Site-to-Site Internet Traffic Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Bundler, a new middlebox that shifts control of network queues from bottleneck links to the sender's site, enabling more effective traffic management and significantly improving flow completion times.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel middlebox architecture called Bundler that aligns control points with bottleneck locations, enhancing traffic regulation and performance in Internet networks.

Findings

Bundler improves median flow completion time by 28% to 97%.

It effectively shifts queue control from bottleneck links to the sender.

Implemented in Linux, validated with real-world and emulation experiments.

Abstract

Queues allow network operators to control traffic: where queues build, they can enforce scheduling and shaping policies. In the Internet today, however, there is a mismatch between where queues build and where control is most effectively enforced; queues build at bottleneck links that are often not under the control of the data sender. To resolve this mismatch, we propose a new kind of middlebox, called Bundler. Bundler uses a novel inner control loop between a sendbox (in the sender's site) and a receivebox (in the receiver's site) to determine the aggregate rate for the bundle, leaving the end-to-end connections and their control loops intact. Enforcing this sending rate ensures that bottleneck queues that would have built up from the bundle's packets now shift from the bottleneck to the sendbox. The sendbox then exercises control over its traffic by scheduling packets to achieve higher-level objectives. We have implemented Bundler in Linux and evaluated it with real-world and emulation experiments. We find that Bundler allows the sender-chosen policy to be effective: when configured to implement Stochastic Fairness Queueing (SFQ), it improves median flow completion time (FCT) by between 28% and 97% across various scenarios.