CoNEXT'13: Virtualizing the Access Network via Open APIs

Presenter: Vijay Sivaraman

Co-authors: Tim Moors, Hassan Habibi Gharakheili, Dennis Ong, John Mathews, Grieg Russell

With rapid increase in residential broadband consumption and a growing number of Internet-enabled devices, there is congestion, severe impact on user quality of experience, and hence more challenges for content providers. One solution is to add more bandwidth in the access network, however the access networks are really costly.

This paper is proposing that ISPs virtualize access infrastructure, using open APIs supported through SDN, to create on-demand traffic slices in the network. Then, content providers can programmatically provision capacity to user devices to ensure quality of experience, users can match the degree of virtualization to their usage pattern, and ISPs can realize per-stream revenues by slicing their network resources. They specify the interfaces between the ISP, content provider and the user. They also propose an algorithm for optimally allocating network resources using elastic bulk transfer times and different access paths.

They evaluate the benefits of virtualizing the access network on video traffic and bulk transfer streams by running simulations on real packet traces from a campus network and evaluate and build a prototype.

Q: What if the ISP and content provider are the same entity? How would that affect the problem?

A: The access network will remain the bottleneck.

Q: Have you only considered wifi pooling within the same access network?

A: Yes, for these evaluations we assumed that we have the same operator.