A new kind of network traffic

Many emerging distributed applications require exchanging Delay Tolerant Bulk (DTB) data, i.e., data with volumes in the Tbyte/Pbyte area, having substantial elasticity to delay, e.g., tolerating from a few hours up to a couple of days of delivery delay. Examples include:

• Exchange of backup, synchronization, and data-mining traffic between data centers and cloud apps.
• Transmission of huge scientific and financial data sets to storage and analysis centers across the world.
• Transmission of high definition video between production labs or delivery to movie theaters.  

DTB traffic has traditionally been carried up to now using either physical storage devices delivered through the ordinary postal service, or via expensive dedicated high speed lines (e.g., as in the case of the LHC Grid used for carrying the particle collision data generated by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN).

The objective of Hermes is to take advantage of unutilized resources of commercial ISPs to deliver DTB data faster and cheaper than the existing alternatives.