"Meet-the-faculty" talk: Towards a Next-generation Internet Architecture

Speaker: Matthew Caesar (future CS faculty)

Thursday, November 15 at 1:00 p.m.

Room 4405 Siebel Center

I am a recent graduate from UC Berkeley and I will be arriving as an
assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at UIUC. I
am interested in meeting students interested in investigating networks
and networked systems on the extremely large scale. To jump-start this
discussion, I will be giving an overview of some of my interests and
future plans. To give a flavor of my recent work, I will also describe
one of my ongoing projects on convergence-free routing:

Current distributed routing paradigms (such as link-state,
distance-vector, and path-vector) involve a convergence process
consisting of an iterative exploration of intermediate routes
triggered by certain events such as link failures. The convergence
process increases router load, introduces outages and transient loops,
and slows reaction to failures. We propose a new routing paradigm
where the goal is not to reduce the convergence times but rather to
eliminate the convergence process completely. To this end, we propose
a technique called Failure-Carrying Packets (FCP) that allows data
packets to autonomously discover a working path without requiring
completely up-to-date state in routers. Through simulations, we found
FCP provides improved routing guarantees while maintaining low loss
and control overhead.

Bio:

Matthew Caesar will be joining as an assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science at UIUC.  He recently completed his
Ph.D.  in Computer Science at the University of California,
Berkeley. He had extended internships in research groups at AT&T Labs
and Microsoft Research. He was awarded the NSF Graduate Research
Fellowship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate
Fellowship.  His research interests involve simplifying the management
of distributed systems and networks through principles of
self-organization and self-diagnosis.