Declarative Traffic Engineering for Low-Latency and Reliable Networking

2025-03-27

AI Summary

Existing generalized Load-Balanced Forwarding (gLBF) methods guarantee per-hop latency but lack a joint path planning and latency budgeting mechanism targeting end-to-end deterministic latency and high reliability. This paper addresses cloud-edge collaborative scenarios—such as industrial control and vehicular networks—by proposing dgLBF, a Prolog-based declarative control framework for deterministic networking. It pioneers the integration of logic programming into deterministic network traffic engineering, enabling unified modeling of path selection, per-hop delay allocation, reliability enhancement, path protection, and fate-sharing avoidance. Implemented in just 120 lines of code, dgLBF achieves high scalability. Simulation results demonstrate near-linear policy deployment scaling under saturated network conditions with 6,000 concurrent flows, while significantly improving robustness and recovery performance under heavy load and failure scenarios.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Deterministic Planning
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Probabilistic Programming
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Cloud, edge and content delivery systems for the Web
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Cloud-Edge applications like industrial control systems and connected vehicles demand stringent end-to-end latency guarantees. Among existing data plane candidate solutions for bounded latency networking, the guaranteed Latency-Based Forwarding (gLBF) approach ensures punctual delivery of traffic flows by managing per-hop delays to meet specific latency targets, while not requiring that per-flow states are maintained at each hop. However, as a forwarding plane mechanism, gLBF does not define the control mechanisms for determining feasible forwarding paths and per-hop latency budgets for packets to fulfil end-to-end latency objectives. In this work, we propose such a control mechanism implemented in Prolog that complies with gLBF specifications, called declarative gLBF (dgLBF). The declarative nature of Prolog allows our prototype to be concise (~120 lines of code) and easy to extend. We show how the core dgLBF implementation is extended to add reliability mechanisms, path protection, and fate-sharing avoidance to enhance fault tolerance and robustness. Finally, we evaluate the system's performance through simulative experiments under different network topologies and with increasing traffic load to simulate saturated network conditions, scaling up to 6000 flows. Our results show a quasi-linear degradation in placement times and system resilience under heavy traffic.

Problem

• Ensuring end-to-end latency guarantees for cloud-edge applications
• Developing control mechanisms for latency-based forwarding paths
• Enhancing fault tolerance with reliability and path protection

Innovation

• Prolog-based control for gLBF specifications
• Extends gLBF with reliability and path protection
• Evaluates performance under varied network conditions