CAREER: Putting Network Measurements to Work - Design & Evaluation of Measurement-Driven Network Mechanisms

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The central thesis of this project is that the area of Internet measurements has matured to the point that it can advance from a descriptive to an operational role. Measurements, collected passively or actively at end-hosts, routers, or edge devices and proxies, can be fed back and used in applications, transport protocols, packet forwarding engines, and routing mechanisms. The project aims at the design and evaluation of important network mechanisms driven by measurements. Three such mechanisms are the following. Techniques for the auto-configuration of major router processes, such as buffer management, based on passive measurements in router interfaces Dynamic route selection, driven by active edge-to-edge performance measurements and congestion prediction Transport optimizations for high-bandwidth long-distance networks, using recently developed bandwidth estimation techniques. The focus on measurements is integrated in the project's research and education aspects. A major educational objective is to bring network measurements into the classroom as a learning and visualization tool. The PI is going to create an Internet measurements graduate course, lso covering "network statistics", i.e., a collection of statistical tools for the analysis of network measurements. The project can have a significant technological, economic, and social impact. A wide-scale deployment of network measurements as an operational tool can improve the Internet's performance, resilience, and robustness, and enable new services and applications. The tools, prototypes, and learning material being developed are made publicly available. Finally, the integration of measurements in the curriculum changes radically the way in which computer networking is being taught.