With the advent of new multimedia applications and the surge in Internet growth, networks need to provide strong Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to end users. Current network policies are sometimes ad hoc, leading to two problems: (1) QoS requirements are not guaranteed, and (2) the bandwidth/cost overhead required to support these policies is huge. To offer guaranteed QoS efficiently in a next generation Internet, we need to rethink and radically redesign many components of the current networking infrastructure, from the network topology down to a network switch. In my talk, I will focus on three key components.
- Redesigning high performance switches so they support a variety of application-specific QoS requirements,
- Redesigning routing protocols to guarantee end-to-end delays, and
- Designing network topology to support bandwidth-intensive applications as cheaply and robustly as possible.
For each of the above problems, I will present a principled, algorithmic approach. For the first two problems, we obtain efficient, deployable solutions. For the last, we obtain interesting theoretical results with possible practical ramifications.