Computing Sciences

Data-intensive sciences are becoming increasingly important for modern sciences. The transport control plane (TC-Plane) of the networks supporting data-intensive sciences can be important to achieve efficient and controlled transport of data for data-intensive sciences. In this paper, we analyze FTS, which is the de facto TC-Plane of the largest data-intensive network, revealing both efficiency and resource control issues of the current design. We then present the design and initial evaluation of Transport Control Networking (TCN), a design that is based on FTS but introduces (1) network-application co-design/coordination, which uses ALTO to realize network-wide resource control, and (2) a general, efficient, flexible optimization framework for TC-Plane, which allows both zero-order and first-order (e.g., bottleneck structure) gradient-based algorithms. We also discuss future work to engage the broad networking and data-intensive sciences communities.