Telecommunication Seminars – Fall 2003

Date: 10/06/03
Name: Prof. Mostafa Ammar
Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology
Title: Why Johnny Can’t Multicast: Lessons About the Evolution of the Internet

Abstract:

The need to support multicast (or multipoint) communication in the Internet has been recognized for a long time. Significant effort has been expended over the last three decades by networking researchers and practitioners in designing and building multicast support capability within the Internet. In addition, several research efforts have demonstrated that highly scalable and desirable multimedia and information services can be deployed on top of a multicast-capable Internet infrastructure. Despite this, wide-spread availability and use of multicast communication is lacking in the Internet today. In this talk I will consider the history of multicast communication and services. This will be done in the context of an evolutionary model that explains the current state of multicast deployment. This exploration allows us to draw some lessons regarding the evolution of the Internet and how our approach to research and deployment can affect this evolution.

Biography:

Mostafa H. Ammar is a Regents' Professor with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech where he has been since 1985. His research interests are in the area of computer network architectures, protocols and services. He received the S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1985. He was the co-recipient of the Best Paper Awards at the 7th WWW conference for the paper on the "Interactive Multimedia Jukebox" and the 2002 Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) conference for the paper on "Updateable Network Simulation". He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking from 1999 - 2003. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE.

Date: 10/20/03
Name: Dr. Jennifer Rexford
Institution: AT&T Research Labs
Title: Hot Potatoes Heat Up BGP Routing

Abstract:

The separation of intradomain and interdomain routing is a key feature of the Internet routing architecture. However, intradomain routing protocols such as OSPF and IS-IS do have a (sometimes significant) influence on the path-selection process in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This talk presents an analysis of the influence of OSPF on BGP routing a large tier-1 ISP network. We propose a general methodology for associating BGP update messages with events visible in OSPF. Then, we apply our methodology to streams of OSPF link-state advertisements and BGP update messages from AT&T's domestic IP backbone. Our analysis shows that (i) "hot potato" routing is
sometimes a significant source of BGP updates, (ii) BGP updates can lag 60 seconds behind the related OSPF event, which can cause delays in forwarding-plane convergence, (iii) OSPF-triggered BGP updates have a nearly uniform distribution across destination prefixes, and (iv) the fraction of BGP messages triggered by OSPF varies significantly across time and router locations, with important implications on external monitoring of BGP. We also describe how certain network designs and operational practices increase the impact that internal OSPF events have on BGP routing.

This is a joint work with Renata Teixeira, Aman Shaikh, and Tim Griffin: www.research.att.com/~jrex/papers/hot-potato.pdf

Biography:

Jennifer Rexford is a member of the Network Management and Performance department at AT&T Labs--Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. Jennifer is the chair of ACM SIGCOMM and co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice" (Addison-Wesley, 2001) with Balachander Krishnamurthy. She received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively.

Date: 10/27/03
Name: Prof. George Kesidis
Institution: Pennsylvania State University
Title: Pricing for Differential Services in the Emerging Internet

Abstract:

Routers and protocols that are capable of offering differentiated services and MPLS, specifically bandwidth provisioned LSPs (circuits), are currently being deployed in the Internet. A complementary user-network interface, and billing/pricing mechanism within the Internet, will also need to be deployed, in particular to give users incentives to employ the lower quality classes-of-service for applications that can tolerate them. We propose such a user-network interface that is a natural evolution of TCP. We study network dynamics in which users adjust their transmission rate over diffserv classes-of-service or dynamically resize their LSPs. A pricing mechanism, based simply on current levels of demand, will also be explained. Finally, we describe the role played by future minimum-cost routing protocols to implement scalable billing mechanisms.

Biography:

George Kesidis received his M.S. and Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley in 1990 and 1992 respectively. He was a professor in the E&CE Dept of the University of Waterloo, Canada, from 1992 to 2000. Since April 2000, he has been an associate professor in both the EE and CS&E Depts of the Pennsylvania State University. In 1999, he took a sabbatical with Nortel Networks, Ottawa, to work, in particular, on low-complexity traffic measurement and estimation and on bandwidth scheduling for MPLS. In 2001, he was part time member of technical staff at Mahi Networks working on embedding algorithms in the data plane of their multi-protocol router.

In addition to a book on ATM networking, Prof. Kesidis has authored papers on the following topics related to communication networks: effective bandwidths and traffic modeling, quick simulation, traffic multiplexing (scheduling) algorithms, traffic shaping, traffic measurement and estimation, network resources provisioning for QoS, TCP-friendly active queue management (AQM), network pricing and billing, and modeling and traceback of malicious behavior (network security).

His current research also includes the following problems in wireless ad hoc networking: network self-organization, energy efficient routing, energy efficient medium access control and scheduling, mobility management for sensor networks, and intrusion detection. Currently, he is on the technical program committees of 2004 IEEE INFOCOM (Hong Kong) and 2004 IEEE ICC (Paris) and he will be TPC co-chair of INFOCOM 2007. George Kesidis is a senior member of the IEEE.

Date: 11/10/03
Name: Mr. Gregory Palmer
Institution: MAGPI Power Networking
Title: Economics, Politics, and High Performance Networks

Abstract:

Following the Telecommunications meltdown, academic and research institutions in the United States and around the world found themselves uniquely positioned to build advanced network infrastructure in an affordable and sustainable manner. This presentation will provide an historical background of how education and research communities came together to create national and international R&E networks of an unprecedented nature. Municipal, state, and Federal governments are realizing that new technologies can stimulate economic development thereby introducing a new fervor for politically motivated initiatives that want to take advantage of enhanced communication applications. This raises new regulatory issues on how non-profits may be eating away at the fragile telecommunications industry.Following the Telecommunications meltdown, academic and research institutions in the United States and around the world found themselves uniquely positioned to build advanced network infrastructure in an affordable and sustainable manner. This presentation will provide an historical background of how education and research communities came together to create national and international R&E networks of an unprecedented nature. Municipal, state, and Federal governments are realizing that new technologies can stimulate economic development thereby introducing a new fervor for politically motivated initiatives that want to take advantage of enhanced communication applications. This raises new regulatory issues on how non-profits may be eating away at the fragile telecommunications industry.

Biography:

Greg Palmer has been in the field of communications industry since 1980, working first as a voice technician for the newly created WATS reseller industry, and then progressing into management of Voice and Data Communications. In 1986 Greg began working for Okidata, a leading supplier of printing devices in Japan as well as throughout the world. He installed their first Novell network at the US headquarters in New Jersey, and connected 5 additional sites in the United States via Frame Relay circuits, reducing the cost of supporting the Enterprise network by $100,000 per year. In 1988 he received a business degree in Operations Management from LaSalle University, thereby adding an understanding of the business process to his acquired technical experience. In 1990, he collaborated with the Japanese parent company, OKI Electric, to build an international network that included Japan, Thailand, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Through this effort, the company was able to reduce the lead time to bring goods to the market place by 30 days. Following ten years of service with Okidata, Greg took the position of Director of Campus Computing at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Primary projects included; upgrading the campus infrastructure, piloting a wireless initiative, automating the student billing process, redefining the core routing architecture, and upgrading the central computing system hardware. He also wrote, and received, a grant from the National Science Foundation for connection to the vBNS national backbone. Returning briefly to the corporate sector, Greg took a project assignment with Christian Dalloz, Ltd, A French Company that manufacturers and distributes personal safety products. As Director of Global Operations, he was responsible for coordinating connectivity and local LAN support for 42 sites worldwide. After spending a significant amount of time in Europe, he chose to return to the academic community at the University of Pennsylvania as the Director of MAGPI, (Metropolitan Area Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2). In this role, he has successfully created a financially self-sustaining, high performance network in the Tri-State region covering Eastern PA, NJ, and Delaware, dedicated to enabling the research and education communities.

Abstract:

Networks based on the optical fiber technologies, where digital transmission has at its disposal theoretically infinite fiber bandwidth and switching can be implemented in the domain of "light", are emerging as the key technology and architecture to accommodate, enhance, complement and secure the dynamic capacity required by user's large amounts of personalized data, real-time video streams or interactive applications. Establishing end-to-end wavelength circuits and capacity-on-demand has become reality and configurable optical network infrastructures have open up a wide range of new opportunities in network architectures and services. Next generation services, re-invented through this fiber-based broadband interconnectivity, can be envisioned to provide the enhanced performance options for the existing Internet, and, in addition, the potential for new service functionalities and business models.  This presentation will focus on the evolutionary progress and visionary roadmap in service-centric optical networking, analyzing the recent developments in the telecommunication industry and exploring the role of basic research towards the vision of networked information of the future.

Biography:

Dr. Admela Jukan currently serves as the Program Director in Networking Research at National Science Foundation in Washington, DC, and she also is a Visiting Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Jukan received the M.S and Ph.D degrees from the Polytechnic of Milan, in Italy, and Vienna University of Technology in Austria, respectively. Prior to coming to the US, she has been with the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. In 1999 and 2000, she was a visiting scientist at Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, where she was working on optical-IP networking. She has engaged in a variety of European network research projects, in particular the European research establishments for the Actions ACTS and COST. Dr. Jukan is the author of numerous scientific publications, she has edited three and authored one book, she is the award winner for the best innovative research proposals of Sprint Labs and Vienna Academic Anniversary Foundation and she is actively involved in organization and scientific leadership of a number of conferences and workshops in the field of networking systems and technologies. Her research interests include protocols and architecture for broadband networks, in particular network control and management, constraint-based routing and network self-organization.

Abstract:

A mathematical framework termed "network calculus" has emerged over the past several years, which is aimed at shedding insight into the behavior of networks of queues arising in communication systems. Recently, some interesting connections to the classical theory of linear systems have been discovered. Using graphical arguments, we review these developments, in particular for the case of deterministic models for traffic and systems. We shall also discuss some very recent generalizations which have arisen in the analysis of networks of First-In First-Out (FIFO) queues. The talk will be self contained.

Biography:

R. L. Cruz received the BS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1980 and 1987. He received the MS degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1982. Since 1987, he has been on the faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests are in the design and performance analysis of communication networks, including wireless networks, high speed switching systems, and optical networks. He was a Technical Program Chair of the IEEE INFOCOM Conference (2001), as well as a General Chair of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference (2001). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.