This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project addresses the design and utilization of high-capacity data networks, with the goal of increasing throughput, network security, and reliability. These are issue of paramount importance in the current development of high-speed networks as a computation and communication infrastructure.
The research is using routing methods that employ multi-paths to enhance throughput and security. Techniques from optimization and approximation algorithms are being applied for designing efficient algorithms that optimize throughput with latency, jitter, reliability, and costs constraints. Multi-paths also allow protection against attackers attempting to either eavesdrop or disrupt communications. Efficient algorithms for the computation of the Nash and Stackelberg equilibria in the resulting two-player designer-attacker games are being designed to provide strategies (selection of routes) for the network administrator and insight for the design of a network of low set-up cost and high throughput.
This project contributes to more secure and better utilized high-speed networks, which find applications in collaborative computations for astronomy, bioinformatics, and high-energy physics. The results of the project will lead to the design of provably efficient algorithms for routings which achieve desired throughput and security, and for computing exact or approximate equilibria in designer-attacker games. Simulations will illustrate the benefits on both synthetic and real-life backbone networks. This will open the way for implementation of multi-path routing. The results will be published in technical conferences and journals. A significant part involves training of undergraduate and graduate students in computer networks.
