Internet applications are growing at a phenomenal rate. They range from personal to commercial to mission critical. All of them demand network service reliability, high performance and security. The justification for these demands is mainly due to recent advances in network technologies and resource availability. Internet resources such as network bandwidth, information storage, and computer processing power are no longer the bottlenecks that used to be so in the past. However, the ever increasing traffic demand, dynamics in traffic, and the presence of malicious users pose serious challenges towards meeting these demands. Today's Internet has yet fully overcome these challenges.
This project studies quantitative resource over-provisioning for important classes of network systems to achieve reliability, high performance and security. In simple terms, the over-provisioning principle is one where resources are allocated conservatively based on expected demands. Resource over-provisioning enables better uninterrupted services and better management of traffic dynamics and attacks. However, resource over-provisioning cannot be done in an ad hoc manner. Careless over-provisioning of resources comes with increased monetary costs, maintenance overhead, and in some cases performance and security degradation as well. Hence, it is important that resources are quantitatively over-provisioned to avoid these problems. To conduct quantitative resource over- provisioning, a host of issues need to be resolved including how many extra resources to provision, and how to optimally provision the extra resources. The focus of this project is the design of algorithms for such optimization problems in resource over-provisioning. This project has immediate and significant impacts on the networking arena. Quantitative resource over-provisioning can serve as an important foundation to effectively provide services with high levels of reliability, performance and security to internet applications.
