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：当前互联网缺乏支持端主机进行细粒度域间预留的带宽预留基础设施，这阻碍了视频通话、游戏、云系统、金融交易、远程手术及其他受益于可靠通信的远程应用等实时服务的服务质量保障。本文提出Hummingbird——一种新型轻量级域间带宽预留系统，解决了先前设计方案的多项缺陷。Hummingbird支持灵活且可组合的预留机制，无需自治系统为其端主机管理预留即可实现端到端保障。先前的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，进而实现了控制平面与数据平面的分离。这一设计选择支持多种控制平面机制共存，并催生了创新方法，例如基于区块链智能合约的控制平面可提供可交易的带宽预留资产与端到端保障。数据平面设计确保了边界路由器的高效处理简洁性，从而简化了实现、部署及流量监管流程，同时保持了稳健的安全特性。