Schedule

April 6, Speaker: Prof. Xiaowei Yang

Title: Introduction to research at NDS group

Abstract: See our group webpage for details.

April 13: Speaker: Glenn Mackinnon

Title: An Inside Look at a Large Corporate Network

Abstract: The presentation will provide an overview of the Verizon Wireless WAN. Recently praised by both Forrester Research and the Gartner Group as one of the best corporate networks in America, the VZW network reaches more than 2400 locations and provides access to over 60,000 users. The network has an aggregate availability record of better than 99.95% and moves more than 20 TB of data daily.

Bio: Glenn MacKinnon, first year student in the UCI Networked Systems PhD program, does Capacity Planning for the VZW network. As Associate Director of Network Implementation he led the engineering team that designed and built the merged network in 2000-2. Since then he has developed the initial corporate policies for implementing WLans, VoIP, Network Video and QoS. He was a VLSI Layout Designer and managed a network of CAD systems at Hughes Aircraft prior to becoming a network manager in 1988.

April 20: Speaker: Prof. Magda Elzarki

Title: Robust Multimedia Services An Application Layer Approach to Quality Control

Abstract: Packet-switched networks, such as the Internet, currently do not, and most likely will not in the near future - due to policy and pricing issues - provide hard-guaranteed Quality of Service required for high quality multi media service offerings. Our research work has primarily focused on developing a robust application layer based solution and treating the underlying network as a black box. As such, our solution makes the least assumptions on the underlying network infrastructure and concentrates on pre and post processing at the application level only. All quality control, synchronization and power consumption are handled at the application layer.

In this talk I will present several research projects that illustrate our efforts in this domain. We will show that with little overhead and some basic understanding of the transmitted video signal, a multimedia service offering can withstand most vagaries of a network, except for extreme situations.

April 27: Speaker: Prof. Luke Bao

Title: A New Approach to Anonymous Multicast Routing in Ad Hoc Networks [Slides]

Abstract: Anonymity in ad hoc network routing came as a means to hide the identification information of nodes, traffic, paths and network topology, which is an effective counter-attack measure to a number of attacks such as traffic analysis, spoofing and denial of services. In this paper, we propose AMUR, an Anonymous MUlticast Routing protocol, for ad hoc networks. AMUR uses Bloom filters to encode source multicast tree in each multicast packet to provide anonymity of nodes, links, routing tables, and source routing trees for multicast purposes. We specify the AMUR protocols, and investigate its robustness against network mobility and various attacks.

May 4: Speaker: Karim El Defra

Title: Optimal Allocation of Filters against DDoS Attacks [slides]

Abstract: Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are a major problem in the Internet today. During a DDoS attack, a large number of compromised hosts send unwanted traffic to the victim, thus exhausting the resources of the victim and preventing it from serving its legitimate clients. One of the mechanisms that can be used against DDoS is filtering, which allows routers to selectively block unwanted traffic. Given the magnitude of DDoS attacks and the high cost of filters in the routers today, the successful mitigation of a DDoS attack using filtering crucially depends on the efficient allocation of filtering resources.

In this work, we consider a single router, typically the gateway of the victim, with a limited number of available filters. We study how to optimally allocate filters to attack sources, or entire domains of attack sources, so as to maximize the amount of good traffic preserved, under a constraint on the number of filters. First, we look at the single-tier problem, where the collateral damage on legitimate traffic is high due to the filtering at the granularity of attack domains. Second, we look at the two-tier problem, where we have an additional constraint on the number of filters and filtering is performed at the granularity of attackers and/or domains. In both cases, we formulate the problem as an optimization problem and we evaluate the optimal solution over a range of realistic attack-scenarios. Finally, we propose and evaluate efficient low-complexity heuristics.

May 11: Speaker Prof. Tatsuya Suda

UCI Netgroup Introduction

Molecular Communication Introduction

Dynamic Service Composition using Semantic Information

May 18: Speaker: Qian Zhou (Advisor: Prof. Kane Kim)

Title: Remote Car Driving and Digital Music Ensemble Realized on TMO Network

Abstract: Remote car driving and digital music ensemble are two novel applications which are realized by utilizing the TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) programing model and the concept of TCoDA (global-Time-based Coordination of Distributed Actions). In the remote car driving application, the driver controls the car which is running in a remote location by looking at the video streaming transmitted from the car side. The application requires the real-time video streaming and deterministic actuation time of the control signals. In the digital music ensemble application, multiple small-footprint PCs, each equipped with its own speakers, act as instrument players or singers forming an ensemble. Each PC also connects a microphone which can capture the clapping sound of the listener. By calculating with the difference of the sound capturing time at different PCs, the listener's location can be determined, and then the speaker nodes will adjust accordingly to achieve the best sound effect at the listener's location.

May 25: Michael Tin (Cisco)

June 1: Michael Srivianos

Title:Dandelion: Cooperative Content Distribution with Robust Incentives [Slides]

Abstract:Content distribution via the Internet is becoming increasingly popular. To be cost-effective, commercial content providers are considering the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent to save on bandwidth costs and to handle peak demands. However, when an online content provider uses a P2P protocol, it faces a crucial issue: how to incentivize its clients to upload to their peers. This paper presents Dandelion, a system designed to address this issue in the case of paid content distribution. Unlike previous solutions, most notably BitTorrent, Dandelion provides robust (provably non-manipulable) incentives for clients to upload to others. In addition, unlike systems with tit-for-tat-based incentives, a client is motivated to upload to its peers even if the peers do not have content that interests the client. A client that honestly uploads to its peers is rewarded with credit, which can be redeemed for various types of rewards, such as discounts on paid content. In designing Dandelion, we trade scalability for the ability to provide robust incentives. The evaluation of our prototype system on PlanetLab demonstrates the viability of our approach. A Dandelion server that runs on commodity hardware with a moderate access link is capable of supporting up to a few thousand clients. These clients can download content at rates comparable to those of BitTorrent clients

June 8: Jessica Yu (NACS)

Title:UCINet and Beyond

Asbract: UCINet is composed of 1443 network devices serving total of 23,542 active network connections. In addition to wired network, wireless network is widely deployed on campus. UCINet connects to CENIC, a regional network, and via CENIC, to Internet2 as well as the global Internet. This presentation will cover the architecture of UCINet and its external connections. Technologies deployed in UCINet, such as routing, VoIP and LWAP/CAPWAP for wireless network will be described. In addition, some future planning in the area of Advanced Network Services in the networks of UC system will be discussed as well.

Speaker Bio: Jessica Yu is currently the Network Architect of Network Academic and Computing Services (NACS) in UC Irvine. She is responsible for UCINet network planning and serves as a liaison with faculty members to identify their advanced networking needs. She also works on engineering and operation of the UCINet. Jessica is one of the members of UC's Advanced Network Services Work Group. Jessica Yu was one of members of the original team at Merit Network Inc. who built and implemented the T1 NSFNet backbone in 1987. She co-authored CIDR specification and served as chair and co-chairs for working groups of the IETF. Jessica also did pioneer work on BGP and its deployment. Before joining UCI, she worked at AOL and UUnet responsible for network design and engineering.