The growth of global Internet traffic has driven an exponential expansion of the submarine cable network (SCN), both in terms of the sheer number of links and its total capacity. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretching over 1 million kilometers connecting nearly every corner of the earth, provides nearly all intercontinental Internet connectivity. It serves as the operational backbone of global services like those of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, and is critical for addressing connectivity needs in underserved areas of the world. For example, increasing international capacity typically results in wholesale and consumer price (broadband) drops; even a 10% increase in broadband Internet access can yield an increase of 1.38% in Gross Domestic Product.
Despite the scale and criticality of the SCN, very little has been reported in the research literature on its characteristics or its broader role in the global Internet. There is a distinct dearth of publicly available information about many of these cable systems features, how they interconnect with terrestrial infrastructure, how they are managed, and how services utilize them. Indeed, most past studies have either treated the SCN as a black box or focused on specific events and their impact on particular links or networks. This lack of understanding of the SCN, coupled with its complexity and rapid growth, makes it increasingly difficult to manage and maintain, and more vulnerable to problems that degrade performance or disrupt services that rely on it.
We make the case for a new research agenda focused on characterizing the global submarine network and the critical role it plays as a basic component of any inter-continental end-to-end connection.
People
Group members
External collaborators
Former members and collaborators
- Shucheng “Alex” Liu (Northwester U.)
- Ishaan Madan (Northwester U.)
- Peter K. Chan (Northwester U.)
Papers
Shucheng Liu, Zachary S. Bischof, Ishaan Madan, Peter K. Chan, Fabián E. Bustamante Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind - A User-View on the Criticality of the Submarine Cable Network Inproceedings Proc. of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2020. Abstract | BibTeX | Links: @inproceedings{aliu:imc20,
title = {Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind - A User-View on the Criticality of the Submarine Cable Network},
author = {Shucheng Liu and Zachary S. Bischof and Ishaan Madan and Peter K. Chan and Fabián E. Bustamante},
url = {https://github.com/NU-AquaLab/Criticality-SCN
https://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SLiu-IMC2020.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-10-27},
booktitle = {Proc. of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)},
abstract = {Nearly all international data is carried by a mesh of submarine cables connecting virtually every region in the world. It is generally assumed that Internet services rely on this submarine cable network (SCN) for backend traffic, but that most users do not directly depend on it, as popular resources are either local or cached nearby. In this paper, we study the criticality of the SCN from the perspective of end users. We present a general methodology for analyzing the reliance on the SCN for a given region, and apply it to the most popular web resources accessed by users in 63 countries from every inhabited continent, collectively capturing ≈80% of the global Internet population. We find that as many as 64.33% of all web resources accessed from a specific country rely on the SCN. Despite the explosive growth of data center and CDN infrastructure around the world, at least 28.22% of the CDN-hosted resources traverse a submarine cable.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Nearly all international data is carried by a mesh of submarine cables connecting virtually every region in the world. It is generally assumed that Internet services rely on this submarine cable network (SCN) for backend traffic, but that most users do not directly depend on it, as popular resources are either local or cached nearby. In this paper, we study the criticality of the SCN from the perspective of end users. We present a general methodology for analyzing the reliance on the SCN for a given region, and apply it to the most popular web resources accessed by users in 63 countries from every inhabited continent, collectively capturing ≈80% of the global Internet population. We find that as many as 64.33% of all web resources accessed from a specific country rely on the SCN. Despite the explosive growth of data center and CDN infrastructure around the world, at least 28.22% of the CDN-hosted resources traverse a submarine cable. |
Zachary S. Bischof, Romain Fontugne, Fabián E. Bustamante Untangling the world-wide mesh of undersea cables Workshop ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), 2018. Abstract | BibTeX | Links: @workshop{bischof:untangling,
title = {Untangling the world-wide mesh of undersea cables},
author = {Zachary S. Bischof and Romain Fontugne and Fabián E. Bustamante},
url = {http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/undersea.pdf},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-11-19},
booktitle = {ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets)},
abstract = {The growth of global Internet traffic has driven an exponential expansion of the submarine cable network, both in terms of the sheer number of links and its total capacity. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretched over 1 million kilometers, connects nearly every corner of the earth and is instrumental in closing the remaining connectivity gaps. Despite the scale and critical role of the submarine network to both business and society at large, our community has mostly ignored it, treating it as a black box in most studies from connectivity to inter-domain traffic and reliability. In this paper, we make the case for a new research agenda focused on characterizing the global submarine network and the critical role it plays as basic component of any inter-continental end-to-end connection.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {workshop}
}
The growth of global Internet traffic has driven an exponential expansion of the submarine cable network, both in terms of the sheer number of links and its total capacity. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretched over 1 million kilometers, connects nearly every corner of the earth and is instrumental in closing the remaining connectivity gaps. Despite the scale and critical role of the submarine network to both business and society at large, our community has mostly ignored it, treating it as a black box in most studies from connectivity to inter-domain traffic and reliability. In this paper, we make the case for a new research agenda focused on characterizing the global submarine network and the critical role it plays as basic component of any inter-continental end-to-end connection. |