The human brain is an interesting machine. Damage one part of the brain and the function in that part can move over to another part. The brain was the inspiration for a lot of early work in designing self-repairing networks.

Lili Qiu, a researcher in the Systems and Networking group, is focusing her attention on building a network that can self-manage - in other words, do what the human brain does.

"My current project is managing wireless networks," said Qiu. "I'm working on enabling networks to self-diagnose faults and performance problems, and automatically recover from them. It is a very exciting problem. It would be of great use if we can provide automatic ways to facilitate the management process, and potentially for a network to manage itself."

Her research is aimed towards finding ways for networks to perform their best for the end-user. One of her projects was studying multi-hop wireless networks. She looked at the performance of a wireless network with a specific physical placement of wireless nodes and a specific traffic load. Her research, conducted with co-workers, suggested that 'shortest path routes' aren't always the optimum. Instead, there is a potential to provide much better performance through interference-aware routing.

Qiu is also interested in exploring the impact of selfish users in both Internet and wireless networks. "A recent trend in routing research is to avoid network-level inefficiencies by allowing hosts to choose their own routes using either source routing or overlay routing," said Qiu.

"Such routing schemes are considered selfish because the decisions are no longer based on system-wide criteria," she explained.

Theoretical results showing that selfish routing can result in sub-optimal performance have cast doubts on this approach. However, using realistic topologies and traffic demands, Qiu's research shows that selfish routing achieves close to optimal latency in such environments. Her work also points out selfish routing poses new research challenges to network engineering.

Qiu believes that technology can make our lives easier and more entertaining. However, she'd like to think that it won't replace more personal forms of communication.

"Technology sometimes helps bring people closer, but not always. Nowadays when holidays come, we send e-cards to friends instead of phone calls or making a personal visit. It would be nice to use technology to assist but not replace personal communication."