2015/05/13 by Ankit Singla, Singla, Ankit, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran +7
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Optical Network Technologies #Caching and Content Delivery #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1505.03449
arxiv created 2015/05/13 · openalex publication_date 2015/05/13 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In principle, a network can transfer data at nearly the speed of light. Today's Internet, however, is much slower: our measurements show that latencies are typically more than one, and often more than two orders of magnitude larger than the lower bound implied by the speed of light. Closing this gap would not only add value to today's Internet applications, but might also open the door to exciting new applications. Thus, we propose a grand challenge for the networking research community: building a speed-of-light Internet. Towards addressing this goal, we begin by investigating the causes of latency inflation in the Internet across the network stack. Our analysis reveals that while protocol overheads, which have dominated the community's attention, are indeed important, infrastructural inefficiencies are a significant and under-explored problem. Thus, we propose a radical, yet surprisingly low-cost approach to mitigating latency inflation at the lowest layers and building a nearly speed-of-light Internet infrastructure.