Abstract:

Traditional network design can compensate for a small number of node and link failures, but cannot handle attacks or failures on a massive scale. These massive-scale phenomena may be due to malicious behavior in the network, such as a denial of service attack, or due to disaster, such as an emergency sensor network deployed in a catastrophic location such as a fire or flood. A primary focus of our research has been to design or enhance routing protocols so that they are more resilient to these massive-scale challenges. The talk will first cover the Secure Overlay Services (SOS) architecture we proposed that utilizes network overlays to proactively protect targeted Internet sites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Next, we will explore the problem of maximizing the amount of data that can be extracted to a base-station from a sensor network whose nodes are undergoing rapid failures. We develop a novel distributed network coding technique and demonstrate how, in a massive failure setting, our coding/routing technique outperforms prior state-of-the-art. I will finish the talk with a brief run-through of other projects that our lab has focused on.