Summary
Distributed applications are important tools for managing global enterprises as they improve both the speed and scale of decision-making, learning, and other critical functions.
Virtual documents are one example of a commonly used distributed application. These provide organizations with the ability to have multiple writers and editors collaborate on document authoring in near real-time regardless of their physical locations. These critical productivity tools rely on internet-enabled, enterprise-wide communication systems to interconnect sites and create a global substrate to support their operation.
While these applications have become increasingly vital for enterprises, approaches to specifying and controlling network quality of service (QoS) for them has not been deployed at scale. There are many reasons for this, including the complexity of decentralized resource control in a federated internet, and the demonstrated effectiveness of low-level Internet protocols such as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) in exploiting and sharing the available capacity amongst networked applications.
The Searchlight program explores novel approaches to analysis and QoS management of an enterprise’s distributed applications overlaid on the internet.
The goal of the program is to develop techniques and systems that enable an enterprise to temporarily decrease the QoS for low-priority application traffic internal to the organization, resulting in sufficient QoS for the organization’s high-priority traffic.