Meta Research

This paper presents Facebook’s design and operational experience of a Hose-based backbone network planning system. This initial adoption of the Hose model in network planning is driven by the capacity and demand uncertainty pressure of backbone expansion. Since the Hose model abstracts the aggregated traffic demand per site, peak traffic flows at different times can be multiplexed to save capacity and buffer traffic spikes. Our core design involves heuristic algorithms to select Hose-compliant traffic matrices and cross-layer optimization between the optical and IP networks. We evaluate the system performance in production and share insights from years of production experience. Hose-based network planning can save 17.4% capacity and drops 75% less traffic under fiber cuts. As the first study of Hose in network planning, our work has the potential to inspire follow-up research.