It Takes Two to Tango: Cooperative Edge-to-Edge Routing

Abstract

In their unrelenting quest for lower latency, cloud providers are deploying servers closer to their customers and enterprises are adopting paid Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offerings with performance guarantees. Unfortunately, these trends contribute to greater industry consolidation, benefiting larger companies and well-served regions while leaving little room for smaller cloud providers and enterprises to flourish. Instead, we argue that the public Internet could offer good enough performance, if only edge networks could work together to achieve better visibility and control over wide-area routing. We present Tango, a cooperative architecture where pairs of edge networks (e.g., access, enterprise, and data-center networks) collaborate to expose more wide-area paths, collect more accurate measurements, and split traffic more intelligently over the paths. Tango leverages programmable switches at the borders of the edge networks, coupled with techniques to coax BGP into exposing more paths, without requiring support from end hosts or intermediate ASes. Experiments with our preliminary Tango deployment (using IPv6 addresses and the Vultr cloud provider) show that Tango could offer much greater visibility and control over wide-area routing, allowing the public Internet to meet the needs of many modern networked applications.