Rethinking Internet Traffic Management Using Optimization Theory

In the Internet today, traffic management spans congestion control (at end hosts), routing protocols (on routers), and traffic engineering (by network operators). Historically, this division of functionality evolved organically. This talk presents a top-down redesign of traffic management using recent innovations in optimization theory. First, we propose an objective function that captures the goals of end users and network operators. Using all known optimization decomposition techniques, we generate four distributed algorithms that divide traffic over multiple paths based on feedback from the network links. Combining the best features of the algorithms, we construct a traffic management protocol that is distributed, adaptive, robust, flexible and easy to manage. Further, our new protocol can operate based on implicit feedback about packet loss and delay. We show that using optimization decompositions as a foundation, simulations as a building block, and human intuition as a guide can be a principled approach to protocol design.

This is joint work with Jiayue He, Martin Suchara, Ma’ayan Bresler, and Mung Chiang.

Speaker Details

Jennifer joined the Network Systems Group of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University in February 2005 after eight and a half years at AT&T Research. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to design, understand, and manage. Jennifer is co-author of the book Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement (Addison-Wesley, May 2001) and co-editor of She’s an Engineer? Princeton Alumnae Reflect (Princeton University, 1993). Jennifer served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM from 2003 to 2007, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association. She received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the U. Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She was the winner of ACM’s Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional of the year for 2004.

Date:
Speakers:
Jennifer Rexford
Affiliation:
Princeton University (also Consulting Researcher at Microsoft Research)