POPBrick: A High-Elasticity, Reconfigurable Network Infrastructure to Support POP Applications

摘要

In traditional POP (Point Of Presence), the continuous increase of traffic load brought by massive accesses from end users to data centers results in the serious lack of bandwidth and the frequent network congestion in backbone network, thus causing a marked decrease of experience quality. In this context, we explore the insightful prospect of functional integration between traditional POP and data center to propose a new POP architecture, which, if realized, can provide promises both for forwarding packets and for renting extra-resources. However, due to the intrinsic limits of traditional POPs and data centers, a new version born out of the prior system architectures cannot provide an effective solution. Thus, we firstly propose an idea of infrastructure as a block, which proves to be an efficient and practical architecture for establishing different functional blocks based on the fabric responsible for the connectivity for different resources. And then POPBrick, a high-elasticity, reconfigurable network infrastructure to support POP applications, is advocated to achieve our vision, where these functional blocks are optionally interconnected in the similar way as the "building block" game. We establish POPBrick prototype by using state-of-the-art technologies, and evaluate its basal performance.