CAREER: Disruption Tolerant Routing in Wired and Wireless Networks

University South Carolina Research Foundation, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

Disruptions occur often even in well-managed wired networks due to various failures and more so in emerging wireless networks due to additional causes such as external interference. With the increased use of the Internet for many real-time business applications, there is a growing demand for high service availability despite such disruptions. The goal of this project is to develop resilient routing schemes that mitigate the impact of disruptions on mission-critical applications and services. Specifically, this project aims to: (i) devise a failure inferencing based fast rerouting scheme to provide failure protection similar to MPLS fast-reroute without altering the destination-based forwarding paradigm prevalent in IP networks; (ii) design scalable localized on-demand link state routing schemes that ensure reliable delivery in spite of disruptions without requiring accurate state at each node; (iii) explore ways to utilize both topology and position information for handling disruptions; (iv) extend and apply these methods for load balancing and resilient multicasting. This project will boost the robustness of the Internet and enable services that improve the lives of everyone. It also has significant educational value in addition to facilitating knowledge sharing and distance education as a result of an always-available Internet. The results from this project will be assimilated into advanced graduate level and introductory undergraduate level theory courses as well as hands-on laboratory courses. Furthermore, the research advances will also be disseminated to the industry and the broader community through several publications and prototypes.