Toronto Networking Seminar


Organized by Department of Computer Science and
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto







Rethinking Internet Traffic Management Using Optimization Theory





Jennifer Rexford


Department of Computer Science


Princeton University




Date:  Friday, September  26,  2pm

Location: BA 1210 



Abstract:




In the Internet today, traffic management spans congestion control (at end
hosts), routing protocols (on routers), and traffic engineering (by network
operators). Historically, this division of functionality evolved organically.
This talk presents a top-down redesign of traffic management using recent
innovations in optimization theory. First, we propose an objective function
that captures the goals of end users and network operators.  Using all known
optimization decomposition techniques, we generate four distributed algorithms
that divide traffic over multiple paths based on feedback from the network
links. Combining the best features of the algorithms, we construct a traffic
management protocol that is distributed, adaptive, robust, flexible and easy to
manage. Further, our new protocol can operate based on implicit feedback about
packet loss and delay. We show that using optimization decompositions as a
foundation, simulations as a building block, and human intuition as a guide can
be a principled approach to protocol design.


This is joint work with Jiayue He, Martin Suchara, Ma'ayan Bresler, and Mung
Chiang.




Bio:



Jennifer joined the Network Systems Group of the Computer Science Department at
Princeton University in February 2005 after eight and a half years at AT&T
Research. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and
network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to
design, understand, and manage. Jennifer is co-author of the book Web Protocols
and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement
(Addison-Wesley, May 2001) and co-editor of She's an Engineer? Princeton
Alumnae Reflect (Princeton University, 1993). Jennifer serves as the chair of
ACM SIGCOMM, and as a member of the CRA Board of Directors. She received her
BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her
MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the U.
Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She was the winner of ACM's Grace
Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional of the year for
2004.




Host of the talk



Yashar Ganjali (yganjali@cs.toronto.edu)