Hummingbird: Fast, Flexible, and Fair Inter-Domain Bandwidth Reservations

TL;DR

Hummingbird is a lightweight, market-based QoS system for the Internet that enables flexible inter-domain bandwidth reservations with incentives for providers, using tradable assets and smart contracts to ensure fairness and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel asset-based control plane for inter-domain bandwidth reservations that incentivizes providers and simplifies implementation.

Findings

Prototype demonstrates scalability and efficiency.

Can fill 160 Gbps link with commodity hardware.

Market-based approach ensures fair resource allocation.

Abstract

To realize the long-standing vision of providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees on a public Internet, this paper introduces Hummingbird: a lightweight QoS-system that provides fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts. Hummingbird enables flexible and composable reservations with end-to-end guarantees, and addresses an often overlooked, but crucial, aspect of bandwidth-reservation systems: incentivization of network providers. Hummingbird represents bandwidth reservations as tradable assets, allowing markets to emerge. These markets then ensure fair and efficient resource allocation and encourage deployment by remunerating providers. This incentivization is facilitated by decoupling reservations from network identities, which enables novel control-plane mechanisms and allows the design of a control plane based on smart contracts. Hummingbird also provides an efficient reservation data plane, which streamlines the processing on routers and thus simplifies the implementation, deployment, and traffic policing, while maintaining robust security properties. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the efficiency and scalability of Hummingbird's asset-based control plane, and our high-speed software implementation can fill a 160 Gbps link with Hummingbird packets on commodity hardware.