Application-Level Document Caching in the Internet

With the increasing demand for document transfer services such as the World Wide Web comes a need for better resource management to reduce the latency of documents in these systems. To address this need, we analyze the potential for document caching at the application level in document transfer services. We have collected traces of actual executions of Mosaic, reflecting over half a million user requests for WWW documents. Using those traces, we study the tradeoffs between caching at three levels in the system, and the potential for use of application-level information in the caching system. Our traces show that while a high hit rate in terms of URLs is achievable, a much lower hit rate is possible in terms of bytes, because most profitably-cached documents are small. We consider the performance of caching when applied at the level of individual user sessions, at the level of individual hosts, and at the level of a collection of hosts on a single LAN. We show that the performance gain achievable by caching at the session level (which is straightforward to implement) is nearly all of that achievable at the LAN level (where caching is more difficult to implement). However, when resource requirements are considered, LAN level caching becomes much more desirable, since it can achieve a given level of caching performance using a much smaller amount of cache space. Finally, we consider the use of organizational boundary information as an example of the potential for use of application-level information in caching. Our results suggest that distinguishing between documents produced locally and those produced remotely can provide useful leverage in designing caching policies, because of differences in the potential for sharing these two document types among multiple users.

Resource Management for Responsive Web Computing

The exploding demand for services like the World Wide Web reflects the potential that is presented by globally distributed information systems. The number of WWW servers world-wide has doubled every 3 to 5 months since 1993, outstripping even the growth of the Internet. At each of these self-managed sites, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) already constitute a rudimentary basis for contributing local resources to remote collaborations. However, the Web has serious deficiencies that make it unsuited for use as a true medium for metacomputing --- the process of bringing hardware, software, and expertise from many geographically dispersed sources to bear on large scale problems. These deficiencies are, paradoxically, the direct result of the very simple design principles that enabled its exponential growth. There are many symptoms of the problems exhibited by the Web: disk and network resources are consumed extravagantly; information search and discovery are difficult; protocols are aimed at data movement rather than task migration, and ignore the potential for distributing computation. However, all of these can be seen as aspects of a single problem: as a distributed system for metacomputing, the Web offers unpredictable performance and unreliable results. The goal of our project is to use the Web as a medium (within either the global Internet or an enterprise intranet) for metacomputing in a reliable way with performance guarantees. We attack this problem one four levels: (1) Resource Management Services: Globally distributed computing allows novel approaches to the old problems of performance guarantees and reliability. Our first set of ideas involve setting up a family of real-time resource management models organized by the Web Computing Framework with a standard Resource Management Interface (RMI), a Resource Registry, a Task Registry, and resource management protocols to allow resource needs and availability information be collected and disseminated so that a family of algorithms with varying computational precision and accuracy of representations can be chosen to meet realtime and reliability constraints. (2) Middleware Services: Complementary to techniques for allocating and scheduling available resources to serve application needs under realtime and reliability constraints, the second set of ideas aim at reduce communication latency, traffic congestion, server work load, etc. We develop customizable middleware services to exploit application characteristics in traffic analysis to drive new server/browser design strategies (e.g., exploit self-similarity of Web traffic), derive document access patterns via multiserver cooperation, and use them in speculative prefetching, document caching, and aggressive replication to reduce server load and bandwidth requirements. (3) Communication Infrastructure: Finally, to achieve any guarantee of quality of service or performance, one must get at the network layer that can provide the basic guarantees of bandwidth, latency, and reliability. Therefore, the third area is a set of new techniques in network service and protocol designs. (4) Object-Oriented Web Computing Framework A useful resource management system must deal with job priority, fault-tolerance, quality of service, complex resources such as ATM channels, probabilistic models, etc., and models must be tailored to represent the best tradeoff for a particular setting. This requires a family of models, organized within an object-oriented framework, because no one-size-fits-all approach is appropriate. This presents a software engineering challenge requiring integration of solutions at all levels: algorithms, models, protocols, and profiling and monitoring tools. The framework captures the abstract class interfaces of the collection of cooperating components, but allows the concretization of each component to be driven by the requirements of a specific approach and environment.

Accelerating Internet Streaming Media Delivery Using Network-Aware Partial Caching

Internet streaming applications are adversely affected by network conditions such as high packet loss rates and long delays. This paper aims at mitigating such effects by leveraging the availability of client-side caching proxies. We present a novel caching architecture (and associated cache management algorithms) that turn edge caches into accelerators of streaming media delivery. A salient feature of our caching algorithms is that they allow partial caching of streaming media objects and joint delivery of content from caches and origin servers. The caching algorithms we propose are both network-aware and stream-aware; they take into account the popularity of streaming media objects, their bit-rate requirements, and the available bandwidth between clients and servers. Using realistic models of Internet bandwidth (derived from proxy cache logs and measured over real Internet paths), we have conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of various cache management alternatives. Our experiments demonstrate that network-aware caching algorithms can significantly reduce service delay and improve overall stream quality. Also, our experiments show that partial caching is particularly effective when bandwidth variability is not very high.

"Networking is IPC": A Guiding Principle to a Better Internet

This position paper outlines a new network architecture, i.e., a style of construction that identifies the objects and how they relate. We do not specify particular protocol implementations or specific interfaces and policies. After all, it should be possible to change protocols in an architecture without changing the architecture. Rather we outline the repeating patterns and structures, and how the proposed model would cope with the challenges faced by today's Internet (and that of the future). Our new architecture is based on the following principle: Application processes communicate via a distributed inter-process communication (IPC) facility. The application processes that make up this facility provide a protocol that implements an IPC mechanism, and a protocol for managing distributed IPC (routing, security and other management tasks). Existing implementation strategies, algorithms, and protocols can be cast and used within our proposed new structure.

Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management

We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.

QoS Controllers for the Internet

In this position paper, we review basic control strategies that machines acting as "traffic controllers" could deploy in order to improve the management of Internet services. Such traffic controllers are likely to spur the widespread emergence of advanced applications, which have (so far) been hindered by the inability of the networking infrastructure to deliver on the promise of Quality-of-Service (QoS).

An Adaptive Policy Management Approach to BGP Convergence

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the current inter-domain routing protocol used to exchange reachability information between Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the Internet. BGP supports policy-based routing which allows each AS to independently adopt a set of local policies that specify which routes it accepts and advertises from/to other networks, as well as which route it prefers when more than one route becomes available. However, independently chosen local policies may cause global conflicts, which result in protocol divergence. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Adaptive Policy Management Scheme (APMS), to resolve policy conflicts in a distributed manner. Akin to distributed feedback control systems, each AS independently classifies the state of the network as either conflict-free or potentially-conflicting by observing its local history only (namely, route flaps). Based on the degree of measured conflicts (policy conflict-avoidance vs. -control mode), each AS dynamically adjusts its own path preferences—increasing its preference for observably stable paths over flapping paths. APMS also includes a mechanism to distinguish route flaps due to topology changes, so as not to confuse them with those due to policy conflicts. A correctness and convergence analysis of APMS based on the substability property of chosen paths is presented. Implementation in the SSF network simulator is performed, and simulation results for different performance metrics are presented. The metrics capture the dynamic performance (in terms of instantaneous throughput, delay, routing load, etc.) of APMS and other competing solutions, thus exposing the often neglected aspects of performance.

An Adaptive Management Approach to Resolving Policy Conflicts

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the current inter-domain routing protocol used to exchange reachability information between Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the Internet. BGP supports policy-based routing which allows each AS to independently define a set of local policies on which routes it accepts and advertises from/to other networks, as well as on which route it prefers when more than one route becomes available. However, independently chosen local policies may cause global conflicts, which result in protocol divergence. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Adaptive Policy Management Scheme(APMS), to resolve policy conflicts in a distributed manner. Akin to distributed feedback control systems, each AS independently classifies the state of the network as either conflict-free or potentially conflicting by observing its local history only (namely, route flaps). Based on the degree of measured conflicts, each AS dynamically adjusts its own path preferences---increasing its preference for observably stable paths over flapping paths. APMS also includes a mechanism to distinguish route flaps due to topology changes, so as not to confuse them with those due to policy conflicts. A correctness and convergence analysis of APMS based on the sub-stability property of chosen paths is presented. Implementation in the SSF network simulator is performed, and simulation results for different performance metrics are presented. The metrics capture the dynamic performance (in terms of instantaneous throughput, delay, etc.) of APMS and other competing solutions, thus exposing the often neglected aspects of performance.