Towards an Information Plane for Distributed Services

Google Tech Talks
February 15, 2007

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I will argue for adding a new layer to the Internet protocol stack. Instead of assuming that every application running on the Internet must do its own performance discovery, this layer would provide fast and accurate predictions of every property of interest. We have built a prototype of this new layer, called the iPlane. The key insight in the iPlane is to leverage measurements of the Internet's internal structure at a meaningful level of abstraction. We have used the resulting structural model to predict a variety of end-to-end path performance metrics such as loss rate and capacity. We have also used it to dramatically improve predictions of the geographic location of IP addresses, and we are currently evaluating the approach for predicting path failures for highly available routing. Finally, I will present results of applying iPlane to a set of real applications, showing that using better predictions leads to a significant improvement in end user performance.

Speaker

Tom Anderson, University of Washington