Networking Research: A Foundation for Designing Overlay Network Protocols

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project focuses on an important problem of the design of protocols for con-current joins and leaves, as well as for failure recovery for peer-to-peer net-works. The protocols will be specified to a sufficient level of detail to enable rig-orous proofs of correctness. Most protocols for joining, leaving, and failure re-covery in the overlay networks are described informally or in pseudo code. In-variant and progress properties are often stated without rigorous proofs. As such, they are desirable goals rather than proven properties. In this context, an objective of the proposed research is to investigate a sound foundation for the design, specification, and verification of these protocols. In particular, the re-search is on conceptual foundations for reasoning about consistency to design a suite of protocols for hypercube routing. Furthermore, the techniques for im-proving locality will also be investigated. The approach is to devise optimization steps that are within the constraints of maintaining network consistency. The proposed research will contribute towards designing the next-generation re-search peer-to-peer and overlay networks and tools for interdisciplinary collaborations, as well as shared research and education platforms.