C3PO: Computation Congestion Control (PrOactive) - an algorithm for dynamic diffusion of ephemeral in-network services

There is an obvious trend that more and more data and computation are migrating into networks nowadays. Combining mature virtualization technologies with service-centric net- working, we are entering into an era where countless services reside in an ISP network to provide low-latency access. Such services are often computation intensive and are dynamically created and destroyed on demands everywhere in the network to perform various tasks. Consequently, these ephemeral in-network services introduce a new type of congestion in the network which we refer to as "computation congestion". The service load need to be effectively distributed on different nodes in order to maintain the funtionality and responsiveness of the network, which calls for a new design rather than reusing the centralised scheduler designed for cloud-based services. In this paper, we study both passive and proactive control strategies, based on the proactive control we further propose a fully distributed solution which is low complexity, adaptive, and responsive to network dynamics.