Computing-Aware Networking (CAN) Problem Statement and Use Cases
draft-liu-can-ps-usecases-00

Abstract

Many service providers have been exploring distributed computing techniques to achieve better service response time and optimized energy consumption. Such techniques rely upon the distribution of computing services and capabilities over many locations in the network, such as its edge, the metro region, virtualized central office, and other locations. In such a distributed computing environment, providing services by utilizing computing resources hosted in various computing facilities (e.g., edges) is being considered, e.g., for computationally intensive and delay sensitive services. Ideally, services should be computationally balanced using service-specific metrics instead of simply dispatching the service requests in a static way or optimizing solely connectivity metrics. For example, systematically directing end user-originated service requests to the geographically closest edge or some small computing units may lead to an unbalanced usage of computing resources, which may then degrade both the user experience and the overall service performance. We have named this kind of network with dynamic sharing of edge compute resources "Computing-Aware Networking" (CAN). This document provides the problem statement and the typical scenarios of CAN, which is to show the necessity of considering more factors when steering the traffic to the appropriate service instance based on the basic edge computing deployment to provide the service equivalency.

Authors

Peng Liu
Philip Eardley
Dirk Trossen
Mohamed Boucadair
Luis M. Contreras
Cheng Li
Yizhou Li

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)