1. Networks and Distributed Systems: Project Ideas

2. 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

3. Internet routing Convergence Security
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?

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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!

7. 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

8. Overlays and CDNs Building an overlay for online gaming
OverQoS: providing QoS 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

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

10. 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

11. 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?