NSF-BSF: NeTS: Small: Making BGP work for real-time interactive applications

For decades, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has served as the glue of the Internet, determining the routes that Internet traffic takes from source to destination. While it has supported the tremendous growth of the Internet, the Internet has changed and the applications that run on it are very different from those the Internet originally supported. BGP is not performance-aware, and so it may not choose the best-performing routes. Previous work found that the routes it chooses are often good enough for traditional Internet applications like web browsing, email, and streaming video that can tolerate good-enough performance and temporary blips. However, emerging use cases such as remote health monitoring, telemedicine, virtual reality/adaptive reality, self-driving cars, and robotized factories require reliable low-latency, high-throughput performance to support real-time, interactive, and sometimes critical applications. Despite these needs, BGP cannot simply be replaced or upgraded, as tens of thousands of independent networks rely on it to interconnect and exchange traffic. The project's objectives are twofold: (1) understanding the circumstances in which BGP’s performance and availability are "good enough" and identifying when this is not so; and (2) proposing systems for enhancing BGP’s performance and availability, without requiring undeployable changes to BGP itself. If successful, the project will be the basis for the Internet services of tomorrow, with dependable real-time interactions over rich applications, providing new capabilities to users around the world. The project will investigate the performance and availability of BGP and explore whether and how BGP can be used to optimize performance for the next generation of real-time Internet-based services. The research will address these questions in the context of three critical challenges in modern Internet application delivery: determining to which site to direct the user, routing across the wide area to the site, and selecting a route back to the client from the site. It will develop novel approaches to using BGP that enable it to serve as the underpinning of emerging critical applications. The project will combine theoretical analyses with measurements from long-standing collaborations with content and cloud providers and evaluate the results using system prototypes deployed on the real Internet. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.