Pantheon: the training ground for Internet congestion-control research
Best Paper Award, ATC 2018
Francis Y. Yan, Jestin Ma, Greg D. Hill, Deepti Raghavan, Riad S. Wahby, Philip Levis, and Keith Winstein
Published in Proceedings of the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), July 2018.
Abstract
Internet transport algorithms are foundational to the performance of network applications. But a number of practical challenges make it difficult to evaluate new ideas and algorithms in a reproducible manner. We present the Pantheon, a system that addresses this by serving as a community “training ground” for research on Internet transport protocols and congestion control (https://pantheon.stanford.edu). It allows network researchers to benefit from and contribute to a common set of benchmark algorithms, a shared evaluation platform, and a public archive of results. We present three results showing the Pantheon’s value as a research tool. First, we describe a measurement study from more than a year of data, indicating that congestion-control schemes vary dramatically in their relative performance as a function of path dynamics. Second, the Pantheon generates calibrated network emulators that capture the diverse performance of real Internet paths. These enable reproducible and rapid experiments that closely approximate real-world results. Finally, we describe the Pantheon’s contribution to developing new congestion-control schemes, two of which were published at USENIX NSDI 2018, as well as data-driven neural-network-based congestion-control schemes that can be trained to achieve good performance over the real Internet.
Paper (992KB)
BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{pantheon-atc18, author = "Francis Y. Yan and Jestin Ma and Greg D. Hill and Deepti Raghavan and Riad S. Wahby and Philip Levis and Keith Winstein", title = "{Pantheon: the training ground for Internet congestion-control research}", booktitle = "{Proceedings of the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC)}", year = {2018}, month = {July} }





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