A paper co-authored by Harsha Madhyastha, professor of computer science, has been awarded an Applied Networking Research Prize by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Madhyastha and researchers from Facebook and three other participating universities presented a system called Edge Fabric that large content providers can use to smartly direct traffic over the internet. Facebook uses this system to serve over two billion users across six continents.
To serve millions of users, large websites have to build access points around the world that connect hundreds of networks. Even then, peak traffic demands can be hard for the provider to handle. Edge Fabric offers a real-time performance analysis of different routes, effectively outlining the bandwidth and latency of different options, and a way to incorporate this data into routing decisions.
