SmartRE: An Architecture for Coordinated Network-wide Redundancy Elimination

Application-independent Redundancy Elimination (RE), or identifying and removing repeated content from network transfers, has been used with great success for improving network performance on enterprise access links. Recently, there is growing interest for supporting RE as a network-wide service. Such a network-wide RE service benefits ISPs by reducing link loads and increasing the effective network capacity to better accommodate the increasing number of bandwidth-intensive applications. Further, a networkwide RE service democratizes the benefits of RE to all end-to-end traffic and improves application performance by increasing throughput and reducing latencies. While the vision of a network-wide RE service is appealing, realizing it in practice is challenging. In particular, extending single-vantage-point RE solutions designed for enterprise access links to the network-wide case is inefficient and/or requires modifying routing policies. We present SmartRE, a practical and efficient architecture for network-wide RE. We show that SmartRE can enable more effective utilization of the available resources at network devices, and thus can magnify the overall benefits of network-wide RE. We prototype our algorithms using Click and test our framework extensively using several real and synthetic traces.