Godfrey receives National Science Foundation CAREER Award

4/17/2013

Illinois professor receives CAREER Award

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Brighten Godfrey, an assistant professor in computer science, has received a CAREER Award from the Computer and Network Systems program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research in Flexible Networks with Source Control.

Illinois computer science professor Brighten Godfrey
Illinois computer science professor Brighten Godfrey
Illinois computer science professor Brighten Godfrey

The project aims to bring flexibility to the Internet's core routing and forwarding architecture, allowing greater innovation in how the infrastructure is used.

“The Internet has enabled unparalleled innovation in applications built on top of it,” Godfrey explained in his proposal. “But the core architecture of the Internet itself remains ossified, preventing fundamental advancements in security, mobility, dependability, and content delivery.  For example, the Internet's core protocols can take minutes to adapt to failures, and malicious or buggy route advertisements enable large-scale attacks."

Godfrey’s work focuses on Internet infrastructure in general, with specific interests in cloud computing and data centers, software-defined networking, low-latency networking, and algorithms.

In work supported by the CAREER award, “individual computers can choose how to assemble small building blocks—short segments of connectivity provided by individual networks,” he said. “With this source-controlled routing (SCR) design, the segments can be assembled into many different possible paths, so that data can be transmitted faster and more reliably by sending packets across multiple paths simultaneously, or so machines can protect themselves from certain kinds of attacks without relying on others.”

According to Godfrey, individual networks can create novel kinds of services—such as low-latency or privacy-preserving connectivity—without waiting to coordinate with others.

“This project is solving key problems in network policy, security, and scalability in order to make SCR practical, and is developing new techniques that can utilize SCR, such as accelerating interactive applications like the web.  In addition, we are pursuing educational and outreach activities.”

Godfrey joined the Illinois faculty in fall 2009 after earning his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2010, he received an NSF research grant to further his work on Internet routing protocols.


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This story was published April 17, 2013.