Resource management with hoses: Point-to-cloud services for virtual private networks

As IP technologies providing both tremendous capacity and the ability to establish dynamic security associations between endpoints emerge, virtual private networks (VPNs) are going through dramatic growth. The number of endpoints per VPN is growing and the communication pattern between endpoints is becoming increasingly hard to predict. Consequently, users are demanding dependable, dynamic connectivity between endpoints, with the network expected to accommodate any traffic matrix, as long as the traffic to the endpoints does not overwhelm the capacity of the respective ingress and egress links. We propose a new service interface, termed a hose, to provide the appropriate performance abstraction. A hose is characterized by the aggregate traffic to and from one endpoint in the VPN to a set of other endpoints in the VPN, and by an associated performance guarantee. Hoses provide important advantages to a VPN customer: 1) flexibility to send traffic to a set of endpoints without having to specify the detailed traffic matrix, and 2) reduction in the size of access links through multiplexing gains obtained from the natural aggregation of the flows between endpoints. As compared with the conventional point-to-point (or customer pipe) model for managing quality of service (QoS), hoses provide reduction in the state information a customer must maintain. On the other hand, hoses would appear to increase the complexity of the already difficult problem of resource management to support QoS. To manage network resources in the face of this increased uncertainty, we consider both conventional statistical multiplexing techniques, and a new resizing technique based on online measurements. To study these performance issues, we run trace-driven simulations, using traffic derived from AT&T's voice network and from a large corporate data network. From the customer's perspective, we find that aggregation of traffic at the hose level provides significant multiplexing gains. From the provider's perspective, we find that the statistical multiplexing and resizing techniques deal effectively with uncertainties about the traffic, providing significant gains over the conventional alternative of a mesh of statically sized customer pipes between endpoints.