Unison: Enabling Content Provider/ISP Collaboration using a vSwitch Abstraction

Abstract

BGP was initially created assuming by default that all ASes are equal. Its policies and protocols, namely BGP, evolved to accommodate a hierarchical Internet, allowing an autonomous system more control over outgoing traffic than incoming traffic. However, the modern Internet is flat, making BGP asymmetrical. In particular, routing decisions are mostly in the hands of traffic sources (i.e., content providers). This leads to suboptimal routing decisions as traffic sources can only estimate route capacity at the destination (i.e., ISP). In this paper, we present the design of Unison, a system that allows an ISP to jointly optimize its intra-domain routes and inter-domain routes, in collaboration with content providers. Unison provides the ISP operator and the neighbors of the ISP with an abstraction ISP network in the form of a virtual switch. This abstraction allows the content providers to program the virtual switch with their requirements. It also allows the ISP to use that information to optimize the overall performance of its network. We show through extensive simulations that Unison can improve ISP throughput by up to 30% through cooperation with content providers. We also show that cooperation of content providers only improves performance, even for non-cooperating content providers (e.g., a single cooperating neighbour can improve ISP throughput by up to 6%).