Timely, Reliable, and Cost-Effective Internet Transport Service using Structured Overlay Networks

Amy Babay, Johns Hopkins University
Host: Yair Amir

Emerging applications such as remote manipulation and remote robotic surgery require communication that is both timely and reliable, but the Internet natively supports only communication that is either completely reliable with no timeliness guarantees (e.g. TCP) or timely with only best-effort reliability (e.g. UDP). We present an overlay transport service that can provide highly reliable communication while meeting stringent timeliness guarantees (e.g. 130ms round-trip latency across the US) over the Internet. To enable routing schemes that can support the necessary timeliness and reliability, we introduce dissemination graphs, providing a unified framework for specifying routing schemes ranging from a single path, to multiple disjoint paths, to arbitrary graphs. Based on an extensive analysis of real-world network data, we develop a timely dissemination-graph-based routing method that can add targeted redundancy in problematic areas of the network. We show that this approach can cover close to 99% of the performance gap between a traditional single-path approach and an optimal (but prohibitively expensive) scheme.

Speaker Biography

Amy Babay is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she works with Yair Amir in the Distributed Systems and Networks Lab. Her research focuses on enabling new Internet services using structured overlay networks and on building intrusion-tolerant critical infrastructure systems. She received her BA in Cognitive Science in 2012 and her MSE in Computer Science in 2014, both from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to starting her PhD, she gained experience with global overlay networks in the commercial world, working at LTN Global Communications.