The internet at the speed of light

Ankit Singla, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, P. Brighten Godfrey, Bruce Maggs

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

For many Internet services, reducing latency improves the user experience and increases revenue for the service provider. While in principle latencies could nearly match the speed of light, we find that infrastructural inefficiencies and protocol overheads cause today's Internet to be much slower than this bound: typically by more than one, and often, by more than two orders of magnitude. Bridging this large gap would not only add value to today's Internet applications, but could also open the door to exciting new applications. Thus, we propose a grand challenge for the networking research community: a speed-of-light Internet. To inform this research agenda, we investigate the causes of latency inflation in the Internet across the network stack. We also discuss a few broad avenues for latency improvement.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 13th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets 2014
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450332569
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 27 2014
Event13th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets 2014 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: Oct 27 2014Oct 28 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 13th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets 2014

Other

Other13th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period10/27/1410/28/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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