CNS Core: Small: Designing Networks for Stringent Performance Requirements

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

With the wide-spread adoption of online and cloud-based services, it is critical that the underlying computer network infrastructure meet increasingly stringent performance requirements (e.g., sustain throughput for business-critical applications). These requirements must be met despite failures that are the norm given the global scale of Internet service provider (ISP) and cloud provider networks, and their rapid pace of evolution. This project will tackle these challenges by developing novel techniques that enable network architects to plan their network designs (e.g., design topology, provision capacity, algorithms for re-routing traffic on failures) so that performance is acceptable over a large set of scenarios the network may encounter. The project will bring together expertise in network systems, and optimization theory, and advance the state-of-the-art in two key ways. First, the project will develop (i) new mechanisms that may be deployed in the network to respond to failures, and (ii) frameworks that can certify that the resulting performance is acceptable over specified failure states. A novelty of the framework is the ability to model rich and flexible network mechanisms. Second, unlike existing methods that only consider worst-case performance, and may be overly conservative, this project will develop novel ways to design for requirements that must be satisfactory for a desired percentage of scenarios. The project will enable significant real-world impact by ensuring that networks comply with Service Level Objectives in the face of failures, and lead to networks with lower cost, better performance, and higher reliability. By making fundamental advances in optimization, the project will impact other scientific disciplines beyond networking. The project will engage with industry and network operator forums, and extensively involve doctoral, Masters, and undergraduate students in the research. The project will incorporate inter-disciplinary material in networking and optimization courses, and will involve active participation in K-12 outreach activities. The results from the project will be available at: https://engineering.purdue.edu/~isl/certifiabledesign.html. The results will be available throughout the duration of the project, and for three years after. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.