Networks and Distributed Systems Project Ideas Project Areas

Networks and Distributed Systems: Project Ideas

Project Areas • • • Routing Network security Privacy in distributed systems Intermittent connected systems Traffic control networks Overlays and CDNs Wireless networks Root cause analysis in distributed systems Network topology evolution

Internet routing • Convergence – BGP has exponential convergence time – Can we design a protocol with better convergence properties? • Security – BGP security proposals are hard to deploy – Defensive policy filters: Can we set routing policy filters defensively to increase the barrier to attack?

Enterprise routing • Mismatch between control plane and data plane – Filtering and routing are treated as different problems in different planes! • Class-based routing – Associate traffic with different classes and perform configuration on a per class basis

Security • Decentralized Secure DNS • Computing trust reputation in decentralized systems • Consistent Groups – a framework for integrating security in different distributed systems and routing protocols • Security in Social networks • Privacy preserving information systems

Traffic signaling networks • Road traffic in various cities is a big problem! • Can we inter-network traffic signals within a city to provide better traffic signaling? – View it as a networking problem with buffers!

Intermittent Networks • What if your network is not up all the time or communication is very intermittent – Cell phone SMS – Power shut down – Lack of wireless signal – Mobility • How do you design distributed systems in intermittent networks? – Disconnected ATM – Searching medical records

Overlays and CDNs • Building an overlay for online gaming – Over. Qo. S: providing Qo. S using overlay networks – Can we provide better guarantees for gaming traffic? • Intelligent handling of packet loss • Multicast of packets • Low bandwidth CDNs – How do you adapt a CDN to operate when you have variable bandwidth characteristics on different links? • Very low bandwidth links near the end-host • Layered coding of video

Wireless networks • Wifi-based Long distance networks – How do you make Wi. Fi work over 100 kms? • Use directional antenna • Change the MAC protocol completely – How do you build large distribution Wi. LD networks? • Urban mesh networks – How do you deal with interference in urban mesh networks? • Too many access points – NYU wireless testbed effort!

Root cause analysis • Quickly detect where failures occur in distributed systems – Internet Routing – Financial systems – Server farms – Large code bases • Using machine learning techniques to build a statistical toolkit that can be used in different systems

Network topology evolution • Internet topology models are very inaccurate – Do not have a good sense of economics embedded in them? • Can we design an economic model that can reasonably predict Internet topology and traffic evolution?