Networks and Distributed Systems: Project Ideas

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Networks and Distributed Systems Project Ideas
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Project Areas

• 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

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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?

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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

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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

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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!

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Intermittent Networks

• What if your network is not up all the time or
  communication is very intermittent
• 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

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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

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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!

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Root cause analysis

• Quickly detect where failures occur in
  distributed systems
• 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

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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?