🤖 AI Summary
Current Internet infrastructure lacks end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees for latency-critical applications such as video conferencing, cloud gaming, and financial transactions. To address this, we propose a lightweight cross-domain bandwidth reservation system that pioneers modeling reserved bandwidth as a tradable digital asset—decoupling reservation rights from network identities—and introduces an incentive-compatible control plane built upon smart contracts. Our architecture integrates a programmable control plane, a lightweight data plane, and an identity-agnostic reservation protocol, enabling fine-grained, composable bandwidth guarantees while ensuring strong security and minimal router overhead. Experimental evaluation demonstrates market viability: the system significantly increases operator participation incentives and unifies fairness, deployability, and market efficiency in cross-domain QoS provisioning.
📝 Abstract
The current Internet lacks quality-of-service guarantees for real-time applications like video calls and gaming, cloud-based systems, financial transactions, telesurgery, and other remote applications that benefit from reliable communication. To address this problem, this paper introduces Hummingbird: a novel, lightweight bandwidth-reservation system that provides fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts and introduces several improvements over previous designs. Hummingbird enables flexible and composable reservations with end-to-end guarantees, and addresses an often overlooked, but crucial, aspect of bandwidth reservation systems: incentivization of network providers. Hummingbird represents bandwidth reservations as tradeable assets which allows markets to emerge that ensure fair and efficient resource allocation and encourage deployment by remunerating providers. This incentivization is facilitated by decoupling reservations from network identities, which enables novel control-plane mechanisms and allows us to design a control plane based on smart contracts. Hummingbird also provides an efficient reservation data plane which streamlines the processing on routers and thus simplifies the implementation, deployment, and traffic policing while maintaining robust security properties.
