CAREER: Adaptive Reliable and Self-Managed Networks

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project develops protocols that allow a network to use multiple paths to deliver traffic demands between any two points, adaptively balancing the load across these paths. The project studies load balancing in both wired and wireless networks taking into account the characteristics of each environment. The work combines theory with practice providing easy-to-implement solutions that are provably stable. The contributions of this work are multifold. First, the developed protocols allow the ISPs to cope with unanticipated changes in traffic demands. Current traffic engineering mechanisms react only to a subset of anticipated events such as single-link or two-links failures, for which they have pre-computed alternate routes. In contrast, the new protocols rebalance the load in realtime to cope with unanticipated changes in traffic demands caused by outages involving multiple links and routers, major BGP reroutes, or network attacks. Second, this work provides the first implementation of multipath routing in an operational wireless access networks. It improves the network throughput and increases the community understanding of how to build better 802.11 access networks. Finally, the work compares end-system multipath routing using overlays and multi-homed domains, and in-network multipath traffic engineering, and provides valuable insights into the interaction between TCP congestion control and the control loop of adaptive multipath load balancers.