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Roch
Guerin Dept. Elec. & Sys. phone: 215 898-9351 |
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(Where I
come from) |
(I teach
or have taught) |
Research
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Recent ·
Past |
Publications ·
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Research Interests and Perspective
My general area of
research is networking, or more
generally the set of issues that arise when a communication infrastructure
allows a multiplicity of individuals and devices to interact. Those issues are both in understanding how to
build the best possible infrastructure to support those interactions, and in
exploring new functionality its availability enables and how this functionality
in turn may affect the development of the infrastructure itself.
The first set of
issues span “traditional” networking topics such routing, traffic engineering,
network optimization, scheduling, etc., while the second deal with broader
issues that reflect the opportunities and challenges in exploiting a ubiquitous
communication infrastructure. One
example of such topics is a recent project on “network economics” (see “Current Projects” for
details) that investigates how various economic factors influence the use and
adoption of new network technologies.
A common theme in
many of the projects I am involved in is to seek mechanisms or solutions that
preferably err on the side of simplicity
rather than optimality. This arguable bias is to some extent rooted
in lessons learned from many years investigating network QoS, based on which I
reached the conclusion that in many cases the cost of implementing optimal
solutions makes them either infeasible or more expensive than the resources
they manage to save. Don’t get me
wrong, optimal solutions are critical as benchmarks that allow us to gauge how
good a job we are doing, and they also often provide the fundamental insight
needed to realize a good, practical solution.
However, it is important to realize that it is often necessary to go
beyond them to affect real systems, as well as remain aware that in many cases
we are simply optimizing for the wrong metrics (the ones that map into problems
we know how to solve…)
One manifestation of my interests in “simple” solutions is a set of activities under the broad umbrella of “Robust Networking,” of which one example is in developing approaches to leverage the diversity inherent to large-scale networks such as the Internet, and use it to improve resiliency to the many unavoidable impairments that continuously plague such large, distributed systems (see the presentation “Size Does Matter! From the Age of Closed-Loop to the Age of Open-Loop” given at NeXtworking’07 – 2nd COST-NSF Workshop on Future Internet, April 2007, Berlin, Germany, together with the accompanying one-page abstract for additional details).
Multimedia and Networking Lab
Most of my research
is carried out under the auspices of the Multimedia and Networking Lab;
a
multi-disciplinary lab involving several faculty and exploring a variety of topics
broadly connected by their dependency on “networks.” These topics span the various protocols
layers, from the physical layer to the application layer, and embody the many
opportunities and challenges behind realizing and leveraging ubiquitous communication. Projects in the lab also often involve a
mixture of analysis and experiments, with experiments taking advantage of the
several local and global testbeds available, many of which were built using
equipment generously donated by industry partners such as 3COM, IBM, and Lucent.
Support for
most projects comes from NSF and industrial
partners such as Sprint Labs,
Nortel Networks, and Siemens.