Networks and Distributed
Systems: Project Ideas
Project Areas
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Routing
Network security
Privacy in distributed systems
Intermittent connected systems
Traffic control networks
Overlays and CDNs
Wireless networks
Root cause analysis in distributed systems
Network topology evolution
Internet routing
• Convergence
– BGP has exponential convergence time
– Can we design a protocol with better convergence
properties?
• Security
– BGP security proposals are hard to deploy
– Defensive policy filters: Can we set routing policy
filters defensively to increase the barrier to attack?
Enterprise routing
• Mismatch between control plane and data plane
– Filtering and routing are treated as different
problems in different planes!
• Class-based routing
– Associate traffic with different classes and perform
configuration on a per class basis
Security
• Decentralized Secure DNS
• Computing trust reputation in decentralized
systems
• Consistent Groups – a framework for integrating
security in different distributed systems and
routing protocols
• Security in Social networks
• Privacy preserving information systems
Traffic signaling networks
• Road traffic in various cities is a big problem!
• Can we inter-network traffic signals within a
city to provide better traffic signaling?
– View it as a networking problem with buffers!
Intermittent Networks
• What if your network is not up all the time or
communication is very intermittent
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Cell phone SMS
Power shut down
Lack of wireless signal
Mobility
• How do you design distributed systems in
intermittent networks?
– Disconnected ATM
– Searching medical records
Overlays and CDNs
• Building an overlay for online gaming
– OverQoS: providing QoS using overlay networks
– Can we provide better guarantees for gaming traffic?
• Intelligent handling of packet loss
• Multicast of packets
• Low bandwidth CDNs
– How do you adapt a CDN to operate when you have
variable bandwidth characteristics on different
links?
• Very low bandwidth links near the end-host
• Layered coding of video
Wireless networks
• Wifi-based Long distance networks
– How do you make WiFi work over 100 kms?
• Use directional antenna
• Change the MAC protocol completely
– How do you build large distribution WiLD
networks?
• Urban mesh networks
– How do you deal with interference in urban mesh
networks?
• Too many access points
– NYU wireless testbed effort!
Root cause analysis
• Quickly detect where failures occur in
distributed systems
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Internet Routing
Financial systems
Server farms
Large code bases
• Using machine learning techniques to build a
statistical toolkit that can be used in different
systems
Network topology evolution
• Internet topology models are very inaccurate
– Do not have a good sense of economics embedded
in them?
• Can we design an economic model that can
reasonably predict Internet topology and traffic
evolution?