Taming limits with approximate networking
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Internet is the linchpin of modern society, which the various threads of modern life weave around. But being a part of the bigger energy- guzzling industrial economy, it is vulnerable to disruption. It is widely believed that our society is exhausting its vital resources to meet our energy requirements, and the cheap fossil fuel fiesta will soon abate as we cross the tipping point of global oil production. We will then enter the long arc of scarcity, constraints, and limits— a post-peak “long emergency” that may subsist for a long time. To avoid the collapse of the networking ecosystem in this long emer- gency, it is imperative that we start thinking about how network- ing should adapt to these adverse “undeveloping” societal condi- tions. We propose using the idea of “approximate networking”— which will provide good-enough networking services by employ- ing contextually-appropriate tradeoffs—to survive, or even thrive, in the conditions of scarcity and limits. See the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hKvgIi-HZY
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Taming limits with approximate networking
- 1. Taming limits with approximate networking Information Technology University (ITU), Pakistan Junaid Qadir
- 2. Post-peak long arc of scarcity
- 3. Approximate computing Figure Credit: “Is “Good Enough” Computing Good Enough?”, Logan Kugler. Many computing systems and applications can tolerate some loss of quality. With such applications in mind, it makes sense to trade off “precision” for gains in “efficiency”).
- 4. Setting up the stage The Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule) The Tainter Curve (the downside of too much complexity) Iatrogenics: the externalities of technology
- 5. Pareto Principle 80/20 RULE: “Among the factors to be considered there will usually be the vital few and the trivial many.” Instead of aiming for 100% ideal networks, we can get good enough services with considerably less effort (and less negative externality).
- 6. Tainter Curve Dangers of over-technologizing `Over-technologizing a society makes it fragile/brittle in the face of future “Black Swans”
- 7. Iatrogenics: healer-given problems The externalities of technology Medicine when overdosed can become a poison. Figure Credit: “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.”, Taleb, N. N. More technology may be less useful! The mindset of abundance, much like scarcity, brings about its own problems—such as overconsumption.
- 8. Approximate networking (AN) Existing examples of AN: Best Effort Internet Bloom Filters; UDP; UDP-Lite Delay tolerant Networks If we relax the requirements of “ideal networking”, we can obtain many advantages – e.g., in terms of reducing cost, complexity, and negative harmful externalities; and in increasing efficiency (e.g., energy efficiency)
- 9. The AN simplicity imperative Occam’s hypothesis: The simplest model that fits the data is also the most plausible. Approximate Networking’s Razor The simplest network (architecture/protocol/algorithm) that satisfies the desired QoS is the most desirable approximation. APPROXIMATE NETWORKING In Machine Learning, there’s a regularization technique known as Lasso that can help build better models by penalizing complexity. Approximate networking can be thought of as the Lasso of networking that aims to build simpler, more scalable, networking solutions.
- 10. The ``good enough’’ becoming better than a complex ideal
- 11. Context-appropriate tradeoffs (high-tech, low-tech) In 5G, the aim is to provide seemingly infinite bandwidth (in others as much bandwidth as the user needs). 5G can exploit the great diversity in application requirements and employ context- appropriate tradeoffs for universal provisioning. Main tradeoffs: Latency vs. Throughput Fidelity vs. Convenience Throughput vs. Coverage/ Reliability Coverage vs. Consumed Power Performance vs. Cost efficiency Privacy vs. Free Content/ Services Spectrum of connectivity options:
- 12. Context-appropriate tradeoffs (high-tech, low-tech, or even no-tech) How to outsource some of things that we do on the current Internet to less-costly and less energy-intensive offline methods (while ensuring that we get enough QoS that is necessary for our applications)?
- 13. Why Approximate Networking? • To be anti-fragile/robust to limits and ``undeveloping’’ environments • For universal coverage (e.g., global access to the Internet for all - GAIA) • Efficiency and Reducing Cost • Dealing with resource constraints (such as limited power).
- 14. Paradoxically, being somewhat defeatured make you resilient! When limits will hit us ... the architectures/ protocols with the bells and the whistles will be hit much harder. Approximate solutions may be more sustainable in an unpredictable world.
- 15. Open research challenges 1. Mitigating the highlighted pitfalls/ challenges 2. Multimodal BD4D analytics 3. Predictive BD4D analytics 4. Combining humans, crowds, and AI 5. Unsupervised BD4D analytics Open questions 1. How do we define context? 2. How do we quantify when our approximation is working and when it is not? • How do we measure the cost of approximation in terms of performance degradation? 3. How to dynamically control the approximation tradeoffs according to the network condition? 4. How to design proper incentivizes for the service provider and the user so that both act harmoniously for provisioning a customer-centric contextually-appropriate service?
- 16. Concluding remarks The deep-rooted reliance on infrastructure—which itself depends on many exogenously sourced depletable resources (such as energy and materials)—makes the modern society vulnerable to a disruptive collapse. To cope up with such a disruptive collapse, we have proposed the idea of “approximate networking” that emphasizes the simplicity imperative. Approximate networking is based on the idea that coping with such a world burdened with limits will require us to adopt context-specific tradeoffs to provide “good enough” service. junaid.qadir@itu.edu.pk
Editor's Notes
- Approximate networking is inspired in part from the emerging architectural trend of “approximate computing” [9] that leverages the capability of many computing systems and applications to tolerate some loss of quality and optimality by trading off “precision” for “efficiency” (typically energy efficiency). Approximate computing works by relaxing the convention of exact equivalence be- tween specification and hardware implementation. By employing approximations at the hardware level, the energy efficiency of systems can be boosted significantly without too much loss in quality. As a concrete example, consider that it has been reported that using approximate computing techniques for the k-means clustering al- gorithm can provide an astounding 50x energy efficiency gain with an an accuracy loss of only 5 percent [10].
- http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-pareto-principle-the-8020-rule/
- As Joseph Tainter argues in his classic work [37], societies gen- erally solve problems in ways that increase complexity (e.g., build- ing additional and/or more complex sociotechnical systems). In- deed, it can be argued that civilization itself, including traditions of great art and writing, “are epiphenomena or covariables of social, political, and economic complexity” [37]. For a time, increasing complexity produces benefits in excess of costs, but complexity is also subject to declining marginal returns, as Tainter depicts with a simple but profound diagram shown in Figure 1, which we refer to as the Tainter curve. The Tainter curve indicates that simple solutions with major benefits will eventually be followed by more complex solutions with modest incremental benefits. At some point, increasing complexity fails to yield net benefits. At that point—point C2 on the Tainter curve—a wise approach would be to control or preferably reduce complexity. Yet seldom are such circumstances recognized or mea- sures taken, and Tainter (as well as Diamond [10]) showed as a result how many historical civilizations continued to increase com- plexity until the attendant costs drove these societies into collapse, aphaseofrapiddeclineinsocietalcomplexity.1 In what ways is abundance harder to cater for than scarcity: “Consider that as I am writing these lines, we are living in a debt crisis. The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” Excerpt From: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” iBooks.
- Refer to the fact that the world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt. For example, consider ``Affluenza’’ is a one-hour television special that explores the high social and environmental costs of materialism and overconsumption. Origin of iatrogenic Greek iatros physician + English -genic Definition of iatrogenic : induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures <an iatrogenic rash> “Naive Interventionism: Intervention with disregard to iatrogenics. The preference, even obligation, to “do something” over doing nothing. While this instinct can be beneficial in emergency rooms or ancestral environments, it hurts in others in which there is an “expert problem.” Excerpt From: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” iBooks.
- Approximate Networking: Old Wine in a New Bottle? Approximation is a classic tool that is employed in computing and networking when faced with constraints, intractability, and trade- offs. We do not claim that approximate networking is a novel way of dealing with networking problems that have resource constraints. Indeed, delay-tolerant networking (DTN), information-centric net- working (ICN), approximate computing, the use of caching and opportunistic communication are all approximate networking solu- tions. However, we contend that the idea of viewing approximate networking as first-class networking and to view it as an overar- ching general framework for dealing with context-appropriate net- working tradeoffs holds new promise. The concept of approximate networking generalizes the concepts of lowest-common denomina- tion networking (LCD-NET) [10] in that the idea of approximate networking extends to the design of network infrastructure as well as algorithms and protocols. Another related research theme is that of challenged networks—which are networks that have very long communication delay or latency; or unstable or intermittently avail- able links; or very low data rates; or very high congestion; or very high error rate.
- Yaser Mostafa’s course. Tom Mitchell: Why Prefer Short Hypotheses? (Occam’s Razor) Argument in favor: • Fewer short hypotheses than long ones —> a short hypothesis that fits the data is less likely to be a statistical coincidence
- More bikes are now produced than cars according to David Edgerton. In recent years around 100 million bicycles were produced every year and only about 40 million cars. In 1950 there were around 10 million of each, and they remained about equal to 1970. The great change was the expansion in Chinese production to 40–50 million bicycles from a few million in the early 1970s.29 In addition Taiwan and India between them were, at the end of the century, making more bicycles than were produced in the world in 1950. Bicycle-derived technologies of the poor megacity provide an instance of a creole technology.
- If we can come to grips with the tricky question of defining context and what it means in terms of the context of the user/ application/ networking/ and operators?
- Coping With Resource Constraints In many developing parts of the world, resource constraints (such as limited power, unstable government) are a norm of life. Even at a global level, it is anticipated that the modern fossil fuel based industrial system is not sustainable, and the impending depletion of these resources will probably give rise to a sudden and permanent shock that may lead to economic instability and infrastruc- tural challenges [2]. Such a severe permanent energy crisis can have far-reaching consequences on the economy and lead developed countries towards being “undeveloping countries” [2]. Ap- proximate networking insights can be used to reorient the design of the Internet’s algorithms, protocols, and infrastructure to better manage the overarching energy, societal, material, and economic limits that this looming scarcity-based future will impose. Need of Energy Efficiency Information and communication technology (ICT) is a big con- sumer of world’s electrical energy, using up to 5% of the overall energy (2012 statistics) [14]. The urgency of developing an energy efficiency manifesto is reinforced when we consider the impend- ing decline of non-renewable energy resources as well as the in- creased demand of ICT (as more and more people get online and use ICT for exchanging greater and greater amounts of data traffic) [4]. This strongly motivates the need for energy efficient Internet- working [15]. The approximate networking trend can augment the hardware-focused approximate computing trend to ensure that the energy crisis is managed through the ingenuous use of approxima- tion. he right of affordable access to broadband Internet is enshrined in the 2015 sustainable development goals of the United Nations. The ITU broadband “Goal 20-20” initiative aims at an optimistic target of universal broadband Internet speeds of 20 Mbps for $20 a month, accessible to everyone in the world by 2020 (Source: Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) Report, 2014). Such an approach—that aims at providing an “ideal networking” experience universally—has historically always failed (due to various socioe- conomical and technical issues). An important reason is that most modern technologies (such as 3G/ 4G LTE and the planned 5G) are urban focused since rural systems (being sparsely populated by definition) do not thus hold much business potential for mobile car- riers [2]. The current percentage of households with Internet access worldwide is 46.4%, with only 34% and 7% of the households in developing countries and least-developed countries having Inter- net access, respectively [3]. The Internet is also large unaffordable when we consider that on average the mobile broadband price and the fixed-line broadband prices are 12 and 40% of the average per- son’s monthly income (with women and rural populations hit the most).3 The UN target aims to reduce the true cost of connecting to the Internet to around 5% of a person’s monthly income. Ap- proximate networking is a particularly appealing option to reach out to the offline human population (more than 4 billion of which live in developing countries).
- “The road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm” Excerpt From: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” iBooks. “But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.” Excerpt From: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” iBooks.
- *Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. It is a concept developed by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile.
- There’s a lot to like about the altruism and idealism of BD4D, but implementing practical BD4D systems that are useful in practice is going to be challenging.