A new space race is imminent, with several industry players working towards satellite-based Internet connectivity. While satellite networks are not themselves new, these recent proposals are aimed at orders of magnitude higher bandwidth and much lower latency, with constellations planned to comprise thousands of satellites. These are not merely far future plans-the first satellite launches have already commenced, and substantial planned capacity has already been sold. It is thus critical that networking researchers engage actively with this research space, instead of missing what may be one of the most significant modern developments in networking. In our first steps in this direction, we find that this new breed of satellite networks could potentially compete with today's ISPs in many settings, and in fact offer lower latencies than present fiber infrastructure over long distances. We thus elucidate some of the unique challenges these networks present at virtually all layers, from topology design and ISP economics, to routing and congestion control.
Various trends are reshaping content delivery on the Internet: the explosive growth of traffic due to video, users' increasing expectations for higher quality of experience (QoE), and the proliferation of server capacity from a variety of sources (e.g., cloud computing services, content provider-owned datacenters, CDNs, and ISP-owned CDNs). In order to meet the scale and quality demands imposed by users, content providers have started to spread demand across multiple CDNs using a broker. Brokers break many traditional CDN assumptions (e.g., unexpected traffic skew and significant variance in demand over short timescales). Through an analysis of data from a leading broker and a leading CDN, we show the potential challenges and opportunities that brokers impart on content delivery. We take the first steps towards improvement through a redesigned broker-CDN interface.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.