Infrastructure Support for Accessing Network Services in Dynamic Network Environments

摘要

Despite increases in network bandwidth, accessing network services across a wide area network still remains a challenging task. The difficulty mainly comes from the heterogeneous and constantly changing network environment, which usually causes undesirable user experience for network-oblivious applications. A promising approach to address this is to provide network awareness in communication paths. While several such path-based infrastructures have been proposed, the network awareness provided by them is rather limited. Many challenging problems remain, in particular: (1) how to automatically create effective network paths whose performance is optimized for encountered network conditions, (2) how to dynamically reconfigure such paths when network conditions change, and (3) how to manage and distribute network resources among different paths and between different network regions. Furthermore, there is poor understanding of the benefits of using the path-based approach over other alternatives.