As the Internet grows larger and more complex, it becomes exceedingly difficult to reason about its structural properties because there exists no scalable method to map the Internet's crucial structural properties such as connectivity, delay and bandwidth. The lack of such structural information in efficiently accessible form leads to poorly functioning and excessively complex network software and protocols. The Internet Geometry project aims to develop geometric models of the Internet's crucial structural properties, much like their geometric longitudes and latitudes can represent distances between locations on the Earth. Geometric models are inherently simple and scalable, and thus can enable a wide variety of scalable performance-aware protocols and applications. The expected contributions of this CAREER research project include new fundamental understanding of the geometric properties of the Internet by studying extensive Internet structural data and new methods to generate accurate network geometric models. The PI will work towards a public global-scale distributed system that enables all Internet nodes to independently compute their network geometric properties, and simple and scalable protocols and systems for network routing and distributed system self-organization enabled by network geometric models.
