On the Impact of Submarine Cable Deployments on Multi-Cloud Network Latencies

Joseph Colton, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Reza Rejaie, Walter Willinger

Abstract: Enterprises are adopting multi-cloud strategies, es-tablishing overlays atop two or more cloud providers (CP) backbones to connect resources and services, even across conti-nents. Simultaneously, there is a significant increase in submarine cable deployments by the CPs to enhance the reliability and performance of their backbone networks. However, enterprises face challenges in understanding how these deployments impact their adoption of multi-cloud strategies. These challenges include the evolving nature of submarine cable deployments, the high cost (and resulting paucity) of data collection efforts on multi-cloud network paths, and a general unawareness of how these deploy-ments impact multi-cloud network path latencies in practice. To address this problem, this work presents a third-party measurement study to corroborate the latency trends/changes characteristics of multi-cloud network paths with submarine cable deployments. To this end, we develop a three-step approach: (1) analyze latency characteristics of multi-cloud paths by comparing two sets of measurements obtained across three major CPs, (2) examine the possible root causes of latency trends by leveraging publicly available data sources on submarine cable deployments, and (3) validate our findings with submarine cable operators and providers. Our study reveals several insights into the impact of submarine cable deployments on multi-cloud network paths' latency characteristics, helping enterprises make informed decisions regarding their cloud overlays. To promote reproducibility and extension of our work, we will release the code and datasets to the community.