Tuneman: Customizing Networks to Guarantee Application Bandwidth and Latency

What is it about?

There are many exciting networked applications around the corner, whether networks of self-driving cars, remote telesurgery, precision agriculture, and more. Many of these new applications have critical requirements from the network. They are so essential for society that they demand unprecedented levels of performance and reliability from the network. We call these types of networks "mission-critical" and focus on the problem of automatically configuring them to provide applications with both dedicated bandwidth and small guaranteed latencies.

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Photo by Ildefonso Polo on Unsplash

Photo by Ildefonso Polo on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our work, Tuneman, explores the consequences of the programmability of a network, where routes, switch schedules, and QoS priorities are all at the command of a centralized controller. Earlier works (e.g., SWAN, B4, FastPass) assumed the network was partially programmable. In existing routers, both routes and QoS parameters can only be coarsely tuned using link weights and queue parameters. We present a path toward full programmability using packet schedules and dynamic routing. Full programmability also paradoxically simplifies matters compared to having a controller restrained with existing switches and limited QoS knobs. Tuneman, thus can be used in mission-critical networks with increasing demands for stringent latency bounds (e.g., telesurgery).