The current Internet lacks a bandwidth-reservation infrastructure that enables fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts. This is hindering the provisioning of quality-of-service guarantees for real-time applications like video calls and gaming, cloud-based systems, financial transactions, telesurgery, and other remote applications that benefit from reliable communication. This paper introduces Hummingbird, a novel lightweight inter-domain bandwidth-reservation system that addresses several shortcomings of previous designs. Hummingbird supports flexible and composable reservations and enables end-to-end guarantees without requiring autonomous systems to manage reservations for their endhosts. Previous systems tied reservations to autonomous-system numbers or network addresses, which limits the flexibility of reservations. In contrast, our system decouples reservations from network identities and, as a result, the control plane from the data plane. This design choice facilitates multiple co-existing control-plane mechanisms and enables innovative approaches, such as a control plane based on blockchain smart contracts that offers tradeable bandwidth-reservation assets and end-to-end guarantees. The data-plane design ensures simplicity for efficient processing on border routers, which streamlines implementation, deployment, and traffic policing while maintaining robust security properties.

翻译：当前互联网缺乏能够为终端主机提供细粒度域间带宽预留的基础设施，这阻碍了视频通话、游戏、云系统、金融交易、远程手术及其他依赖可靠通信的实时应用获得服务质量保证。本文提出蜂鸟系统，一种新型轻量级域间带宽预留系统，解决了先前设计的若干缺陷。蜂鸟支持灵活可组合的预留机制，无需自治系统为其端主机管理预留即可实现端到端保证。传统系统将预留与自治系统编号或网络地址绑定，限制了预留的灵活性；而本系统将预留与网络身份解耦，进而实现控制面与数据面的分离。这一设计选择支持多种控制面机制共存，并催生创新方案，例如基于区块链智能合约的控制面可提供可交易的带宽预留资产及端到端保证。数据面设计确保边界路由器的高效处理，在保持强安全性的同时简化实现、部署与流量监管。