Extending Low Latency Service Across the Internet

Abstract

Protocols such as L4S for low latency network services have attracted growing interest from major industry stakeholders such as Comcast, Apple, T-Mobile, and NVIDIA. However, L4S requires isolation between L4S flows and classic flows in order to maintain its low latency benefits and safe coexistence. The L4S architecture uses a DualPI2 AQM mechanism to provide this isolation when the bottleneck occurs at the home access link. In practice, however, bottlenecks may also occur at other locations in the network, such as peering points, ingress to wide area networks, or occasionally congested links in the core, where deploying DualPI2 AQM is not feasible. Without a solution to this problem, L4S may struggle to gain deployment, since its benefits may remain limited without end-to-end support. To address this challenge, we propose a deployment strategy that reduces the need to upgrade expensive core routers by using existing networking mechanisms such as BGP communities, SRv6, and priority queues with rate caps. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach through large scale experiments on the FABRIC testbed. Our results demonstrate a practical deployment strategy for extending low latency service across the Internet, even across independently administered networks.