To realize the long-standing vision of providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees on a public Internet, this paper introduces Hummingbird: a lightweight QoS-system that provides fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts.

Path aware networking (PAN) is an approach that allows endpoints to participate in the end-to-end path selection, letting them choose paths best suited for each application. This approach offers numerous potential benefits including rapid fail-over, concurrent use of parallel paths, and QoS enabled networks, even spanning multiple domains. The dynamic interconnection of different autonomous systems (ASes) in path aware networks offers both challenges and opportunities for network service providers, which in turn provide opportunities for traffic engineering previously not possible. The SCION path-aware network architecture has been designed from the ground up with security in mind, and features a trust structure that can serve as a basis for more dynamic interconnection between ASes. In this paper, we describe a prototype spot market that lets the ASes sell time-limited excess capacity, allowing buyers to divert traffic to cheaper alternatives temporarily. We believe this market allows for new opportunities both in traffic engineering and inter-domain connectivity that have not existed before. The market benefits all parties involved, as the formerly wasted bandwidth is now used, and provides additional revenue—in varying degrees—to all the participating entities.

Guarantees for traffic traversing the public Internet are hard to come by, as service-level agreements are typically only available for traffic within a single autonomous system or towards direct neighbors. This deficiency leads to unpredictable performance already under normal conditions and can cause outages in the face of networklevel distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In this paper, we present an architecture achieving guaranteed bandwidth properties for global inter-domain network traffic. The control plane of our architecture is based on a distributed server infrastructure, while the data plane enables efficient packet forwarding on per-flow stateless routers. Our implementation demonstrates the technical feasibility and scalability of the design.

Network testbeds have empowered networking re-search and facilitated scientific progress. However, current testbeds focus mainly on experiments involving the current Inter-net. In this paper, we propose SCIONLAB, a novel global network testbed that enables exciting research opportunities and experimentation with the SCION next-generation Internet architecture. New users can join SCIONLAB as a full-fledged autonomous system with minimal effort and administrative overhead, and directly gain unfettered access to its inter-domain routing system. Based on a well-connected network topology consisting of globally distributed nodes, SCIONLAB enables new experiments, such as inter-domain multipath communication, path-aware networking, exploration of novel routing policies, and new approaches for DDoS defense. SCIONLAB has been operational since 2016 and has supported diverse research projects. We describe the design and implementation of SCIONLAB, and present use cases that illustrate exciting research opportunities.