CAREER: Robust, Stable and Secure Routing via a vertically integrated monitoring and introspection system

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

The long-term career goal of the PI is to help transform the Internet into a robust, stable, and secure routing infrastructure that delivers highly reliable and predictable performance. Considering the critical role that the Internet plays in our day-to-day lives, the current routing architecture is surprisingly fragile. Fiber cuts, faulty or mis-configured equipment, and malicious attacks (e.g., the Nimda worm) have led to a widespread loss of global connectivity. To achieve our vision, we have developed the following four research agendas: 1. PI argue that an essential starting point is a thorough characterization of wide-area failure scenarios and how much they impact the traffic-forwarding plane. Through the PI's collaboration with Sprint, will monitor an operational Tier-1 Internet Service Provider's backbone to collect routing and traffic data. Based on successive conditioning of the data, will derive a wide-area failure (WARF) model that can be used by the research community to generate realistic failures in simulation or testbed environments. 2. PI will undertake a complementary effort to design a statistical BGP anomaly detector that automates the process of differentiating abnormal and expected routing behavior. The design follows basic intrusion detection principles in creating a historical profile and performing short-term testing. 3. PI will investigate an alternative approach to policy routing by designing and developing an Overlay Policy Control Architecture (OPCA) that facilitates fast route convergence and traffic engineering. OPCA will allow the concurrent use of multiple types of metrics in intra- and inter-domain routing, and illustrate that such functionality is warranted in the IP core. 4. PI will design a Routing Introspection and Feedback System (RIFS) that provides timely feedback to higher-layer entities such as overlay networks and transport or application layer proxies. will extend our study to explore a hybrid channel coding and retransmission scheme to optimize video streaming based on detection of failures and routing loops. The outcome of this work strives to enable Internet-based distributed computing by making the core Internet more reliable and stable. Effective routing across heterogeneous networks (including wireless and satellite) is the key to truly ubiquitous connectivity, which will have a broad impact on societal applications. The hypothesis and methodologies tested in this project will help advance the knowledge in the field of wide-area routing and form a foundation for analyzing the reliability issues of other large-scale distributed systems. Will make the failure models, tools, and prototypes developed in this project available to other researchers online and via publications and training workshops. The PI's educational mission is to train undergraduate and graduate students to become capable network engineers by incorporating real-life operational experience and anecdotes of wide-area Internet behavior into classroom teaching. This includes developing a capstone design course that gives students hands-on experience in network management and routing modules. The PI will actively recruit underrepresented women and minority students into the engineering curriculum and her research projects by collaborating with the Women in Engineering (WIE) and the Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement (MESA) programs at U. C. Davis.