Leighton '78 speaks on Internet efficiency and e-traffic routing

Tom Leighton '78, chief scientist of Akamai Technologies, spoke yesterday on making the Internet more efficient in the Computer Science building as part of the Gordon Wu Lecture Series.

"The good news about the Internet is it provides an unprecedented way to communicate," Leighton said. "You could post a web page, and 400 million people could access it — without an FCC license."

Leighton said the difficulty with the Internet arises when all 400 million of those users — or a significant fraction of them — attempt to access the same data at the same moment. This type of extensive use results in slow performance.

The pathway that data takes through Internet networks is often long and convoluted. Leighton said his favorite example of unusual Internet traffic behavior is when data sent from Akamai's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. was routed through Israel on its way to an MIT facility several blocks away.

The problem is compounded when large Internet companies, such as AOL, Sprint or UUNet, refuse to share bandwidth with other networks, he said. This creates data bottlenecks at network connection points.

As a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, Leighton and others study the Internet congestion caused by these journeys across multiple servers. The solution, he said, is not faster access, such as DSL or cable modems, but closer content to the individual Internet users.

Akamai was founded to promote the idea of closer content in the late 1990s at MIT. The company offered its first commercial software release in 1999 and has grown rapidly since, expanding to include offices nationwide and affiliates in Europe and Asia.

Akamai's software places commercial content — such as the hightraffic web sites of major companies — on multiple servers located around the world. Traffic is then routed to the nearest and fastest local server, a complex process completed in milliseconds.

"We serve over ten billion hits per day," said Leighton. "That's an order of magnitude greater than all long distance phone calls made in a day. It's a massive computational problem," he said.

To operate with the greatest efficiency, Akamai's software must balance the load among the 13,000 local servers distributed across 65 countries. Leighton presented a graph showing the success of the software, with "Akamaized" sites loading in a fraction of the time of standard sites, even during peak workday hours.

Using multiple servers also increases reliability, Leighton said. A single server crash could not paralyze the site when thousands of backup servers available.

Akamai's future releases will expand the possibilities of "edge serving" to optimize not only a web site, but also a company's online operations.