GreenNet: Energy Management for Network Infrastructure

On today's Internet, energy management is becoming an integral part of end hosts such as servers, personal computers and mobile devices, but the underlying network infrastructure, namely routers, switches and other network devices, still lacks effective energy management solutions. Currently the Internet Service Providers build and operate networks for maximum service availability, resulting in low energy efficiency since network devices are up all the time at full capacity. There are great opportunities to improve network energy efficiency, as well as great research challenges in how to maintain the quality of service at the desired level. In this project, we will measure and profile energy consumption of network devices, design novel routing techniques and energy management mechanisms for routers, and investigate potential cooperation between Internet Service Providers and Content Providers to achieve overall energy efficiency

WIT: A Watchdog System for Internet Routing System

The current Internet lacks defense mechanisms against false routing announcements, which can be caused by either malicious attacks or inadvertent operational mistakes. A well publicized example is the recent hijacking of YouTube's IP prefix by Pakistan Telecom [1, 2 ] in Feburary 2008. In this project we develop a monitoring system to detect false routing announcements and mitigation mechanisms to help operators take quick actions.

AS Topology

The Internet has been evolving rapidly over time like a living organism, and so has its network topology. The evolution of the global Internet topology is the result of the interplay between many economic, technological and operational factors. In this project, we characterize the Internet topology and its evolution through empirical studies, develope theoretical models to understand the driving forces, predict topology in the forseeable future based on recent trends, and evaluate its impacts on routing architecture and protocol design.

BGP Routing Dynamics

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol, which glues tens of thousands of network domains into what we know as the Internet. Due to the large scale of the system, the diversity of routing policies and the complexity of network operations, inter-domain routing in the wild is still not well understood. We analyze BGP routing data to understand routing stability, help identify and diagnose problems.

Internet Content Distribution

Integrate overlay multicast and IP multicast; design solutions that are economically viable and incrementally deployable for global content distribution.

NAT Traversal