Taming limits with approximate networking

ABSTRACT

Internet is the linchpin of modern society, which the various threads of modern life weave around. But being a part of the bigger energy-guzzling industrial economy, it is vulnerable to disruption. It is widely believed that our society is exhausting its vital resources to meet our energy requirements, and the cheap fossil fuel fiesta will soon abate as we cross the tipping point of global oil production. We will then enter the long arc of scarcity, constraints, and limits---a post-peak "long emergency" that may subsist for a long time. To avoid the collapse of the networking ecosystem in this long emergency, it is imperative that we start thinking about how networking should adapt to these adverse "undeveloping" societal conditions. We propose using the idea of "approximate networking"---which will provide good-enough networking services by employing contextually-appropriate tradeoffs---to survive, or even thrive, in the conditions of scarcity and limits.

References

1. R. Heinberg, The party's over: oil, war and the fate of industrial societies. Clairview books, 2005.
2. B. Raghavan, "Networking for undeveloping regions," http://contraposition.org/blog/2013/04/12/networking-for-undeveloping-regions/, 2013.
3. J. Diamond, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Penguin, 2005.
4. B. Raghavan and J. Ma, "Networking in the long emergency," in Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Green networking, pp. 37--42, ACM, 2011.
5. R. L. Hirsch, R. Bezdek, and R. Wendling, "Peaking of world oil production and its mitigation," Driving Climate Change: Cutting Carbon from Transportation, p. 9, 2010.
6. J. Mineraud, L. Wang, and J. K. Sasitharan Balasubramaniam, "Hybrid renewable energy routing for isp networks," in INFOCOM, 2016 Proceedings IEEE, pp. 1--9, April 2016.
7. B. Tomlinson, M. Silberman, D. Patterson, Y. Pan, and E. Blevis, "Collapse informatics: augmenting the sustainability & ict4d discourse in hci," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 655--664, ACM, 2012.
8. W. C. Stirling, Satisficing Games and Decision Making: with applications to engineering and computer science. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
9. J. Han and M. Orshansky, "Approximate computing: An emerging paradigm for energy-efficient design," in Test Symposium (ETS), 2013 18th IEEE European, pp. 1--6, IEEE, 2013.
10. V. K. Chippa, D. Mohapatra, K. Roy, S. T. Chakradhar, and A. Raghunathan, "Scalable effort hardware design," Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 22, no. 9, pp. 2004--2016, 2014.
11. B. Hazeltine and C. Bull, Appropriate Technology; Tools, Choices, and Implications. Academic Press, Inc., 1998.
12. E. Brewer, M. Demmer, B. Du, M. Ho, M. Kam, S. Nedevschi, J. Pal, R. Patra, S. Surana, and K. Fall, "The case for technology in developing regions," Computer, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 25--38, 2005.
13. B. Tomlinson, J. Norton, E. P. Baumer, M. Pufal, and B. Raghavan, "Self-obviating systems and their application to sustainability," iConference 2015 Proceedings, 2015.
14. E. Gelenbe and Y. Caseau, "The impact of information technology on energy consumption and carbon emissions," Ubiquity, vol. 2015, pp. 1:1--1:15, June 2015.
15. B. Raghavan, D. Irwin, J. Albrecht, J. Ma, and A. Streed, "An intermittent energy internet architecture," in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Energy Systems: Where Energy, Computing and Communication Meet, p. 5, ACM, 2012.
16. R. Koch, The 80/20 principle: the secret to achieving more with less. Crown Business, 2011.
17. B. Raghavan, "Abstraction, indirection, and sevareid's law: Towards benign computing," First Monday, vol. 20, no. 8, 2015.
18. J. Chen, "Computing within limits and ictd," First Monday, vol. 20, no. 8, 2015.
19. T. Anderson, S. Shenker, I. Stoica, and D. Wetherall, "Design guidelines for robust internet protocols," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 125--130, 2003.
20. N. Radjou, J. Prabhu, and S. Ahuja, Jugaad innovation: Think frugal, be flexible, generate breakthrough growth. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
21. S. Mullainathan and E. Shafir, Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan, 2013.
22. P. Van Mieghem and L. Vandenberghe, "Trade-off curves for qos routing.," in INFOCOM, Citeseer, 2006.
23. A. Rice, S. Akoush, and A. Hopper, "Failure is an option," The Riseand Riseof the Declarative Datacentre, p. 36, 2008.
24. K. Heimerl, S. Hasan, K. Ali, T. Parikh, and E. Brewer, "An experiment in reducing cellular base station power draw with virtual coverage," in Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, p. 6, ACM, 2013.
25. J. Greer, The Long Descent. New Society Publishers, 2008.
26. D. Wischik, M. Handley, and M. B. Braun, "The resource pooling principle," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 47--52, 2008.
27. Q. Zhao and B. M. Sadler, "A survey of dynamic spectrum access," Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 79--89, 2007.
28. D. Ros and M. Welzl, "Less-than-best-effort service: A survey of end-to-end approaches," Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 898--908, 2013.
29. K. Heimerl, S. Hasan, K. Ali, E. Brewer, and T. Parikh, "Local, sustainable, small-scale cellular networks," in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers-Volume 1, pp. 2--12, ACM, 2013.
30. A. Sathiaseelan and J. Crowcroft, "LCD-Net: lowest cost denominator networking," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 52--57, 2013.
31. J. Qadir, A. Ali, K.-L. A. Yau, A. Sathiaseelan, and J. Crowcroft, "Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath," Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 2176--2213, 2015.
32. D. L. Alderson and J. C. Doyle, "Contrasting views of complexity and their implications for network-centric infrastructures," Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 839--852, 2010.
33. B. Tomlinson, B. Nardi, D. J. Patterson, A. Raturi, D. Richardson, J.-D. Saphores, and D. Stokols, "Toward alternative decentralized infrastructures," in Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, pp. 33--40, ACM, 2015.
34. A. Sathiaseelan, L. Wang, A. Aucinas, G. Tyson, and J. Crowcroft, "Scandex: Service centric networking for challenged decentralised networks," in Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Do-it-yourself Networking: an Interdisciplinary Approach, pp. 15--20, ACM, 2015.
35. K. Fall, "A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets," in ACM'SIGCOMM 2003, pp. 27--34, ACM, 2003.
36. C.-M. Huang, K.-c. Lan, and C.-Z. Tsai, "A survey of opportunistic networks," in Advanced Information Networking and Applications-Workshops, 2008. AINAW 2008. 22nd International Conference on, pp. 1672--1677, IEEE, 2008.
37. A. Mohamed, O. Onireti, M. Imran, A. Imran, and R. Tafazolli, "Control-data separation architecture for cellular radio access networks: A survey and outlook," IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2015.
38. J. Chen, "Computing within limits and ICTD," First Workshop on Computing within Limits, 2015.
39. J. Chen, L. Subramanian, J. Iyengar, and B. Ford, "TAQ: enhancing fairness and performance predictability in small packet regimes," in Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Computer Systems, p. 7, ACM, 2014.
40. K. Heimerl, R. Honicky, E. Brewer, and T. Parikh, "Message phone: A user study and analysis of asynchronous messaging in rural uganda," in SOSP Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR), pp. 15--18, 2009.
41. R. Steinberg and W. I. Zangwill, "The prevalence of braess' paradox," Transportation Science, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 301--318, 1983.
42. R. Mittal, J. Sherry, S. Ratnasamy, and S. Shenker, "How to improve your network performance by asking your provider for worse service," in Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, p. 25, ACM, 2013.
43. G. Varghese, Network algorithmics. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2010.
44. C. Christensen, The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

Index Terms

• Networks

  • Network architectures

    • Network design principles