The goal of this project, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, is stand up a deployed system and associated distributed monitoring and diagnosis algorithms to improve performance, availability, and security of production communication networks. The infrastructure will enable research in two primary settings: network security and network management.
The project provides a unique platform for evaluating systems and algorithms for network management and security that rely on cross-domain visibility. The infrastructure and associated research will enable multidisciplinary research between experts in networking, databases, security, and machine learning. It will provide researchers from these domains both (1) access to real-world network management and security problems from operational networks, thus providing a sound basis for new research problems; and (2) a realistic setting under which they can evaluate their results.
Broader Impact:
The first area of broader impact is in network operations. The infrastructure will be deployed on production networks and will serve as a platform for distributed network monitoring research in both network security and network management. There will be close collaboration with campus network operators at Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, Southern Crossroads (SOX), and Merit Network. The second area is in education. Students in undergraduate and graduate networking courses at the two universities will be given the ability to run their own monitoring experiments on the infrastructure through a controlled interface. The third area is with regard to NSF goals such as those expressed in Future Internet Design (FIND) and Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). The networking community to-date has no infrastructure that facilitates deployment studies of systems and algorithms and the operation of real, production networks. This infrastructure offers a way to bring together different networking and computing communities and explore the hardest management and security problems confronting large-scale networking.
