February 11 , 2010 - Yair Amir

Title: Overlay Networks: An Old-New Communication Paradigm for the Coming Decade

Abstract:
The Internet presents compelling reach, cost and capacity properties that drive more and more forms of communication to use it as their network of choice. These properties stem from a few core design principles underlying the Internet such as packet switching and routing, end-to-end reliability, and addressing.

New applications bring new demands: High performance reliability for large file transfers; low latency interactivity for VoIP calls; point-to-multipoint reliable transport and delivery for live TV; many-to-many timely multicast for interactive games; “perfect” reliability and timeliness for remote surgery.

This talk surveys a personal journey in search of the “right” communication paradigm addressing the above (and future) applications, and the overlay network architecture that was developed along the way. An overlay network is a network that is built over an underlying network such as the Internet: To the underlying network it looks like an application, while to the application it looks like the network. The talk demonstrates how overlay networks provide better performance for some native Internet services, as well as enable new protocols and services beyond those that can be provided by the Internet.

For this Inaugural Professorial Lecture, the speaker will allow himself to make some predictions about future communication architectures and trends, and the research challenges they bring.