Internet is such a slow one.
In principle, it should operate at almost the speed of light, which is more than 670 million miles per hour. Instead, internet data moves 37 to 100 times slower. The technical term for this speed gap is “network latency,” the one-second delay in an internet connection as a signal travels from a computer to a server and back.
We can do better, says Gregory Laughlin, a professor of astronomy in the Yale Department of Arts and Sciences. Laughlin says we can make the Internet at least 10 times faster – perhaps 100 times faster – in the United States.
Laughlin and colleagues P. Brighten Godfrey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Bruce Maggs at Duke and Ankit Singla at ETH Zurich are co-leaders of the discovery of what is slowing Internet speeds – and what has can be done to fix it. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is called Internet at the speed of light.
Several key factors are holding the internet back, researchers say. For example, the network of underground and optical cables on which the internet depends is chaotic. It zigzags beneath highways and rail tracks, circles difficult terrain like mountains, and often sends signals in the wrong direction hundreds of miles at some point during transmission.
Second, there’s the problem of the fiber optic cable itself, which is essentially glass. Internet data are pulses of light that travel over cables; Light moves significantly more slowly as it passes through glass.
Laughlin and his colleagues say that a network of radio towers across the United States would allow internet signals to travel in straight lines, over the air, and increase internet speeds.
Furthermore, says Laughlin, the idea has been successfully tested on a limited scale. For example, stock traders built a microwave network a decade ago between the stock exchanges in Chicago and New Jersey to eliminate valuable seconds of high-frequency trading. .
In their final finding, they presented at 19order USENIX Symposium on Network Design and ImplementationLaughlin and his colleagues have found that microwave networks are reliably faster than fiber optic networks – even in extreme weather conditions – and the economic value of microwave networks will make them Worth the cost of construction.
Laughlin spoke with Yale News recently about the project.
How did you become part of the Internet at the Speed of Light?
Gregory Laughlin: I am interested in the economics of where “price formation” occurs in the US financial markets. This requires the aggregation and correlation of data from different markets, such as the futures market in the Chicago metro area and the stock market in the New York metro area. When I started to solve the problem [in 2008] It is clear that even with a strong incentive to cut latency as much as possible between different locations, physical telecommunications infrastructure still imposes limits that prevent signals from approaching speeds. speed of light.
Why is this project appealing to you?
Laughlin: I like problems where physics, economics, and geography all intersect, and price formation is a perfect match along those lines.
How is this approach different from other tests of internet infrastructure?
Laughlin: The main concern in studies of the physical structure of the internet is often bandwidth, where the concern is how much information per second a person can transmit on a given transmission line. Other work on latency focuses on ideas related to pre-location information, which is the idea behind content delivery networks. Our work is based on the question, “What would the solution be if you wanted to speed up small packet traffic as much as possible across the United States?”
What surprises you most when you see what is slowing down the Internet?
Laughlin: One thing, it’s very well known, but what never ceases to amaze me is the enormous amount of information that can be transmitted through optical fibers. By simultaneously transmitting light in different color bands, highly specialized single multi-core glass fibers are now capable of transmitting hundreds of terabits of data per second. My formative Internet experience occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and so my current Yale office Wifi connection seems very fast. But it was amazing to realize that a single optical fiber can now transmit data at speeds that exceed my office connection by more than a million. It is therefore surprising to realize that with the right hybrid infrastructure, the internet can be both incredibly fast and capable of transferring incredible amounts of data. However, because the internet has formed in a natural rather than a pre-planned way from the top down, it turns out that there are all sorts of curious things about this sluggish performance.
You and your colleagues have suggested that a national network of microwave radio transmission towers would make the Internet faster. Why is this?
Laughlin: Although the coating of microwave radio transmission towers provides only a small, seemingly insignificant increase in bandwidth for the US Internet, the overlay can handle a significant portion of the requests. smallest demand, most sensitive to delay. This type of traffic is associated with procedures that establish a connection between two sites and involves a lot of back-and-forth transmissions in small amounts per byte. By speeding up these routes and taking the most direct routes, you can get 10 to -100 increases in traffic where it matters most. On the other hand, for applications such as streaming video where information can be buffered, there is no need to use microwave towers. Fiber optic cable is the way to go if you have large chunks of data to transfer.
What would it take, in terms of cost and commitment, to create such a network?
Laughlin: In our paper, we created a detailed model of a national microwave network that can transmit 100 gigabits per second between 120 US cities at an average speed just slower than the speed of light. 5%. [which provides the ultimate physical limit]. This network will include about 3,000 microwave transmission points [that use existing towers]and we estimate that it will cost several hundred million dollars to build.
Does that price tag make it worth doing?
Laughlin: We’ve done a detailed cost analysis, and it seems very clear that a project of this type would be economically beneficial. Applications run everything from things like telecommunications surgery to e-commerce and gaming.
How often do you think about this when downloading a document or clicking on a web page?
Laughlin: Only when a website loads slowly!
What was your reaction to the project’s findings?
Laughlin: The team presented its findings at one of the leading conferences in networking and the response was quite positive. Of course, that’s a huge step forward from designing a network in theory and implementing it in practice. But we definitely feel that it’s something that will work and is worth building on.
The source: Yale University
