This project conducts research on the design, implementation, and analysis of algorithms for the support of scalable and reliable communication services in distributed networks. The focus centers around important challenges that affect the national network-communication infrastructure and the needs of increasing numbers of network users and services. These challenges included mitigating the stress on network backbone caused by the diminishing locality of network traffic, easing the addition of large numbers of geographically distributed network hosts, implementing fault-tolerant and congestion-tolerant communication methods, and integrating diverse technologies such as fast-switching and mobile communication devices into the national networking infrastructure. A significant obstacle in meeting these challenges is the difficulty of routing, switching, addressing, and guaranteeing delivery of messages in such a large and growing global network. This is a program of fundamental and applied research attacking these scalability and reliability problems using techniques of network algorithms, computational combinatorics and graph theory. The analysis of the topological structure of networks and the algorithmic properties associated with network routing schemes will be the primary focus. Extensive implementations and empirical studies building on the experience using the network platform provided by the Ohio Supercomputer Center and the OCARNet dedicated ATM research network will be performed.
