Deterministic Dynamic Networks (DDN)

Abstract

Today's network infrastructure evolves into two seemingly opposite directions: cloudification centralizes functions that used to be distributed for economies of scale, at the expense of latency, while latency-constrained applications are surging. This calls for a new architecture capable of distributed computing: The Edge Cloud network. Future 5G applications will impose strict latency and dynamicity requirements on the Edge Cloud, in intra- and inter-data center networks. The Edge Cloud needs a network infrastructure able to deliver: low latency (~microseconds), deterministic data delivery in time (~nanoseconds jitter), and dynamic reconfiguration (~milliseconds) between objects (antennas, robots) in data centers or across data centers, through a fronthaul network. In this paper, we propose, implement, and demonstrate a deterministic dynamic network based Edge Cloud network. On a real-time testbed, we achieve network slicing, low, deterministic latency of only tens of microseconds per-application (per-flow), when competing technologies cannot provide per-flow guarantee. We also show that the network can be dynamically reconfigured at the millisecond timescale.