The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Friday, April 30th, 2010
Broad Research Area: Networks / Operating Systems

Research Interests:

Today’s Internet is a phenomenal success story. It provides connectivity to more than a billion users and hosts a number of indispensable services. It is far larger, much faster and carries more traffic than what its designers ever envisioned. However, over the last few years, there is increasing evidence that the current Internet is unable to adapt to meet emerging challenges. The scalability-first design, based on simple and general primitives in the network core, has been exposed to reveal a number of weaknesses that place fundamental limits on network robustness, availability, and security.

Recognizing this need, my research focus over the past few years has been to develop network primitives, protocols, and services that can serve as building blocks for a more efficient and robust Internet. In particular, I have attempted to tackle the following research questions: Can the core network provide more powerful primitives and abstractions that can enhance Internet’s availability and robustness? What additional intelligence, in the form of protocols and algorithms, can be deployed on end-hosts to more efficiently utilize network resources? Can we define interfaces and services through which network providers and applications can communicate with each other in order to cooperatively manage the network? And can we exploit peer-to-peer techniques to outsource most of the computation to the edge and simultaneously improve availability and performance?

My research activities have yielded a number of widely-used systems. iPlane, an Internet measurement service, has been a valuable resource for the networking research community, with more than forty research projects using the structured network topology information produced by the system. iPlane also enables IP Geolocation, the task of mapping an IP address to a geographical location, which has since been crucial in building Adeona, an open-source, privacy-preserving device tracking system for stolen or lost laptops. Adeona was publicly released recently and has received significant commercial and public interest. The work on peer-to-peer technologies and end-host incentives enabled the development of BitTyrant, a highly optimized and strategic BitTorrent client that has been downloaded by more than a million users. Hubble, an Internet troubleshooting service, has been operating live for more than two years, and RIPE NCC, the organization that provides technical and administrative support for network operations in Europe, is working towards adding Hubble to their suite of network management services. Finally, P4P — the P2P technology for reconciling conflicts between ISPs and P2P systems — is currently being evaluated by four major ISPs (Verizon, ATT, Comcast, and Bell-Canada) on real-world swarms, with initial experiments promising substantial improvements for a wide variety of network performance objectives.

Contact Information:

Email: arvind@cs.washington.edu Phone: 206-616-0957