NetEx: Efficient and cost-effective internet bulk content delivery

The Internet is witnessing explosive growth in traffic due to bulk content transfers, such as multimedia and software downloads, and online sharing of personal, commercial, and scientific data. Yet bulk data transfers remain very expensive and inefficient. As a result, huge amounts of digital data continue to be delivered outside of the Internet using hard drives, optical media or tapes. Meanwhile, large reserves of spare bandwidth lie unutilized in today´s networks, where links are overprovisioned for peak load. We designed NetEx, a bulk transfer system that opportunistically exploits the excess capacities of network links to deliver bulk content cheaply and efficiently. Our results based on data from both a commercial tier-1 ISP and the Abilene network suggest that NetEx can considerably increase the capacity of the network, and at the same time it can provide good average performance to bulk transfers.