Network X-ities for Routing Protocols

Description | Publications | People | Collaborators | Funding

Description

Given society's increasing reliance on communication networks such as the Internet, it is becoming increasingly important that these networks not only provide good performance, but do so in the face of a complex, uncertain, error-prone, and ever-changing environment. The need for such "robust" network operation leads to a set of design considerations that we refer to as the network X-ities (since they all end in "ity"): non-fragility, manageability, diagnosability, optimizability, scalability, and evolvability. Although these X-ities are crucially important in designing and analyzing robust networks and protocols, they often lack theoretical foundations, quantitative frameworks, or even well-defined metrics and meaning. The goal of this project is to begin to build a solid, quantitative foundation for explicitly considering the X-ities in the design and analysis of network architectures and protocols. We do so by considering a number of specific problems, broadly in the area of routing protocols, that allow us to concretely address several of the X-ities and to begin to draw larger lessons from commonalities among the problems studied.

Publications

Impact of content distribution and service providers

Interaction of congestion control and traffic engineering

(Re)designing protocols with managability in mind

People

Collaborators

Funding

The network X-ities project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation as part of the NeTS program, and by a grant from the Cisco University Research Program.