Design and implementation of a system for aggregate internet traffic control

Abstract

Internet content providers can benefit from applying different scheduling and queue management policies to their traffic. However, they currently lack control over the queues that build up at the bottleneck links in the network to effectively enforce desired policies. To address this issue, we propose a new kind of middlebox, called Bundler, which brings the queues in the network under the content provider's control. Bundler sits at the edge of a sender's domain, and bundles together groups of flows that share a common destination domain. It does rate control for each bundle, such that the queuing induced by its traffic is moved from the bottleneck (wherever it might be in the network) to Bundler itself. This allows the sender to unilaterally enforce its desired scheduling policy across the bundled traffic. Bundler has an immediately deployable, light-weight design, which we implement in only ~ 1500 lines of code. Our evaluation, on a variety of emulated scenarios, shows that scheduling via Bundler can improve performance over status quo.