1 Network science (NS): hype or reality? Chuanxiong Guo Microsoft Research Asia September 24, 2009

2 Definition Science (Wikipedia) – Any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome Network Science (the “Network Science” book) – The study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena

3 Predictability Internet collapse in 1980s – TCP congestion control Network expansion – 32-bit IPv4 address and 16-bit AS number – Will IPv6 takeover? Network security – DDos, virus, worm, and spam Network traffic and topology – Self similarity, power law Network applications – Web

4 Networking research: An engineering perspective Classical networking topics – Network architecture/protocol/applications – Multiple access – Packet scheduling/switching/routing – congestion control, traffic engineering/measurement, resource management New technology trends, user requirement, economics of scale – P2p, sensor networks, network security, data center networking, social networking

5 The emerging of network science Inter-disciplinary – Physicist, mathematician, sociologist, information theorist, computer scientist, economist (?) Data-driven discovery

6 Data–driven discovery Spam and botnet detection – Spamming Botnets [Xie08-sigcomm] – Spamalytics [Kanich08-ccs] Network diagnostics, profiling – [Ionut08-sigcomm, Kandula08-sigcomm] Online social networking – [Mislove07-IMC, Nazir08-IMC]

7 Data-driven discovery: system infrastructure Build large scale computing infrastructure for researchers from different disciplines – Scalable data center systems and networks (NSF CLuE program) – Dryad, Hadoop – DryadLinQ, MapReduce Data, data, data! – Accumulation and open access

8 What role can the wireless network and mobile computing community play? Mobile data services – Recent advances in smart-phones – Access bandwidth Mobility patterns – [Gonzalez08-nature, Lee09-infocom] – [Wang09-ScienceExpress] Mobile communication networks – [Palla07-nature, Seshadri08-kdd]

9 Wang-Sciencexpress09Understanding the Spreading Patterns of Mobile Phone Viruses

10 Summary Networking research currently is mainly an engineering field – With research problems generated directly from real world – “We believe in rough consensus and running code“– David Clark Bridging engineering and network science – Data-driven discovery – New models and insights from the broader science community – More predictable designs

11 Network Science Network Engineering tools Data (and problem) Infrastructure