Abstract
In principle, a network can transfer data at nearly the speed of light. Today’s Internet, however, is much slower: our measurements show that latencies are typically more than one, and often more than two orders of magnitude larger than the lower bound implied by the speed of light. Closing this gap would not only add value to today’s Internet applications, but might also open the door to exciting new applications. Thus, we propose a grand challenge for the networking research community: building a speed-of-light Internet. To help inform research towards this goal, we investigate, through large-scale measurements, the causes of latency inflation in the Internet across the network stack. Our analysis reveals an under-explored problem: the Internet’s infrastructural inefficiencies. We find that while protocol overheads, which have dominated the community’s attention, are indeed important, reducing latency inflation at the lowest layers will be critical for building a speed-of-light Internet. In fact, eliminating this infrastructural latency inflation, without any other changes in the protocol stack, could speed up small object fetches by more than a factor of three.
B. Chandrasekaran—This work was done when the author was a graduate student at Duke University.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Data sets (gathered in 2016) and code are available at https://cgi.cs.duke.edu/~ilker/cspeed/pam2017-data/.
- 2.
Explicit volunteer consent was obtained, listing precisely what tests would be run. We have a letter from the IRB stating that our tests did not require IRB approval.
- 3.
We do not claim this is the percentage of Web sites supporting HTTPS.
References
cURL. http://curl.haxx.se/
ESnet. http://www.es.net/
GÉANT. http://www.geant.net/
Google Maps API. http://goo.gl/I4ypU
Internet2. http://www.internet2.edu/
RIPE Atlas. https://atlas.ripe.net
Top 500 sites in each country or territory, Alexa. http://goo.gl/R8HuN6
Workshop on reducing internet latency (2013). http://goo.gl/kQpBCt
Akamai: State of the Internet, Q1 (2016). https://goo.gl/XQt324
Brutlag, J.: Speed matters for Google Web search (2009). http://goo.gl/t7qGN8
Dukkipati, N., Refice, T., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Herbert, T., Agarwal, A., Jain, A., Sutin, N.: An argument for increasing TCP’s initial congestion window. In: SIGCOMM CCR (2010)
Durairajan, R., Barford, P., Sommers, J., Willinger, W.: Intertubes: a study of the US long-haul fiber-optic infrastructure. In: ACM SIGCOMM (2015)
Schurman, E., (Bing), Brutlag, J., (Google): Performance related changes and their user impact. http://goo.gl/hAUENq
Gao, L., Wang, F.: The extent of AS path inflation by routing policies. In: GLOBECOM (2002)
Habib, M.A., Abrams, M.: Analysis of sources of latency in downloading web pages. In: WEBNET (2000)
Holterbach, T., Pelsser, C., Bush, R., Vanbever, L.: Quantifying interference between measurements on the RIPE Atlas platform (2015)
Grigorik, I., (Google): Latency: the new web performance bottleneck. http://goo.gl/djXp3
Liddle, J.: Amazon Found Every 100ms of Latency Cost Them 1% in Sales. http://goo.gl/BUJgV
Maynard-Koran, P.: Fixing the Internet for real time applications: Part II. http://goo.gl/46EiDC
Mühlbauer, W., Uhlig, S., Feldmann, A., Maennel, O., Quoitin, B., Fu, B.: Impact of routing parameters on route diversity and path inflation. Comput. Netw. 54(14), 2506–2518 (2010)
NEC: SEA-US: Global Consortium to Build Cable System Connecting Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States. http://goo.gl/ZOV3qa
Nordrum, A.: Fiber optics for the far North [News]. IEEE Spectr. 52(1), 11–13 (2015)
Radhakrishnan, S., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Jain, A., Raghavan, B.: TCP fast open. In: CoNEXT (2011)
Rexford, J., Wang, J., Xiao, Z., Zhang, Y.: BGP routing stability of popular destinations. In: ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurment (2002)
Singla, A., Chandrasekaran, B., Godfrey, P.B., Maggs, B.: The Internet at the speed of light. In: HotNets. ACM (2014)
Sundaresan, S., Magharei, N., Feamster, N., Teixeira, R.: Measuring and mitigating web performance bottlenecks in broadband access networks. In: IMC (2013)
Täht, D.: On reducing latencies below the perceptible. In: Workshop on Reducing Internet Latency (2013)
Vulimiri, A., Godfrey, P.B., Mittal, R., Sherry, J., Ratnasamy, S., Shenker, S.: Low latency via redundancy. In: CoNEXT (2013)
Wang, X.S., Balasubramanian, A., Krishnamurthy, A., Wetherall, D.: Demystify page load performance with WProf. In: NSDI (2013)
Wang, Z.: Speeding up mobile browsers without infrastructure support. Master’s thesis, Duke University (2012)
Zhou, W., Li, Q., Caesar, M., Godfrey, P.B.: ASAP: a low-latency transport layer. In: CoNEXT (2011)
Acknowledgments
Dhruv Diddi helped process the ESnet data. Data on fiber mileages from GÉANT, the high-speed pan-European research and education network, was obtained through personal communication with Xavier Martins-Rivas, DANTE. DANTE is the project coordinator and operator of GÉANT.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bozkurt, I.N. et al. (2017). Why Is the Internet so Slow?!. In: Kaafar, M., Uhlig, S., Amann, J. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54327-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54328-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)