INGI Seminar

Predictable latency in programmable networks: from theory to practice

by Amaury Van Bemten, Researcher at TUM - München, Deutschland

An important performance metric is packet latency, as many applications - ranging from industrial control loops to synchronization protocols - rely on low and/or guaranteed latencies for the correctness of their operations. Providing latency guarantees to flows requires a deterministic and accurate modeling of delay sources, e.g., of queuing disciplines.

In the first part of this talk, I will explore state-of-the-art models and systems for providing end-to-end latency guarantees and describe how these can be extended to reach higher network utilization, synonym of higher revenue for operators.

In the second part, I will try to answer the question: is the performance of hardware forwarding devices predictable? I will show that it is actually not! Theoretical models and traditional assumptions are indeed surprisingly not always verified for real-word forwarding devices. I will then shortly discuss potential implementation alternatives to take into account the observed performance artifacts while still providing strict performance, and in particular latency, guarantees.

Amaury Van Bemten received the B.Sc. degree in engineering, in June 2013, and the M.Sc. degree in computer science and engineering, in June 2015, both from the University of Liège, Liège, Belgium. He joined the Chair of Communication Networks at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as a PhD candidate in September 2015. His current research is focused on data plane isolation techniques for predictable latency in software-defined networks.