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Talk by Barath Raghavan, Williams College

Overloading the Internet with Decongestion Control
Friday, November 6, 2009
SCI 240, 4:00 pm (cookies at 3:30)

Abstract

Loss avoidance has long been central to the Internet architecture. Ordinarily, dropped packets represent wasted resources. In this talk, I'll posit that the benefits of a network architecture that embraces---rather than avoids---widespread packet loss outweigh the potential loss in efficiency. I'll propose an alternative approach to Internet congestion control called decongestion control. In a departure from traditional approaches, in this approach, end hosts strive to transmit packets faster than the network can deliver them, leveraging end-to-end erasure coding and in-network fairness enforcement. I'll argue that such an approach may decrease the complexity of routers while increasing stability, robustness, and tolerance for misbehavior. While a number of important design issues remain open, I'll show that our approach not only avoids congestion collapse, but delivers near optimal steady-state goodput for a variety of traffic demands in three different backbone topologies.

Biography

Barath Raghavan is currently a visiting assistant professor of Computer Science at Williams College. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2009 and his B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2002. He received the 2007 ACM SIGCOMM paper award and a 2004 NSF graduate research fellowship. Barath's primary research interests include networks, security, distributed systems, and cryptography.