Inverted Capacity Extended Engineering Experiment(ICE³)

Introduction

The recent widespread uptake of broadband access technologies has led to a shift in how the Internet is being used. The availability of an always-connected, high-speed Internet connection means that home users are increasingly likely to use the Internet as an information repository and content delivery resource. Higher content access speeds coupled with a zero connection time means that Internet usage can become more spontaneous rather than planned for.

An always-on broadband Internet also increases the range of applications that users are willing to try and adopt, beyond the current staple diet of web surfing and email. Exposure to peer-to-peer applications (which include instant messaging and chat services) creates an interest in more advanced applications such as streaming multi-media, online gaming and real-time telecommunications.

The traditional Internet access model involves low bandwidth last-mile circuits aggregating into higher bandwidth metropolitan, regional, and international backbones. Consumer market last-mile access typically involves 56K dial-up, cable modem, or ADSL technologies. Regional backbones are often measured in gigabits per second, and many international backbones have capacities in the hundreds of megabits per second.

Of particular interest is whether the current Internet architecture could support an explosion in the patronage of these services and applications. This leads to the questions of what network and applications developers should keep in mind when designing these systems.

What would happen if we inverted this capacity hierarchy?

Imagine that the last-mile became a high bandwidth service (In the order of 10s to 100s of megabits per second - a feasible scenario given developments in passive optical networking). Imagine that town- and city-wide broadband IP access was provided as a common utility service (like electricity and gas). Every suburb's IP customers could be milliseconds (and only a few hops) away from each other. Every town library could run web-caches for their neighborhoods, revitalizing their roles as 21st century information repositories.

ICE³ aims to characterize the performance and service quality impact of inverting the content and capacity hierarchy, with particular reference to the impact on the perceived performance of existing networked applications.

 

Goals

ICE³ encompasses the following topics:

• Evaluate the performance characteristics of some existing and emerging content distribution methods (e.g. Email, Web, or peer to peer methods) as a function of network bandwidth, latency, and hop counts (e.g. the dynamic behavior of the underlying transport protocols, such as TCP)
• Develop plausible, alternative IP network architectures based on inverting the existing bandwidth and service location hierarchy, including large scale distribution of content caches around urban areas.
• Evaluate the consumer's likely experience if such alternative IP network architectures were deployed, and the impact on wide- and local-area IP traffic patterns and load growth.

As part of this project we will develop and release tools to assist in data gathering and analysis, and publish interim results and papers on this website.

Program Members