The Implications of Network-level Packet Caching

摘要: Internet traffic is increasing at a tremendous rate. Some studies predict that the net traffic might grow 5-fold by 2013 [1]. Our recently proposed framework of deploying packet level redundancy elimination (RE) on network elements (eg, routers)([2],[3]) can serve as an effective way to improve network efficiency without expensive upgrades. These proposals expand the scope of point deployments (eg, access links of stub network) of “WAN Optimizers”(Riverbed, Peribit, etc.) to network-wide settings.In the SmartRE design [3], network elements keep track of recently forwarded packets in a cache, strip redundant content from packets and encode them on the fly by comparing against the recently forwarded packets. The downstream network elements decode or reconstruct full packets by looking up their cache in a coordinated fashion. A centralized controller allocates the responsibility of encoding, decoding and caching across network elements, while minimizing the network-wide footprint of duplicate traffic thereby improve networkwide utilization.