The Distributed Network Analysis Research Group, led by Professors Vishal Misra and Dan Rubenstein, comprises of faculty and students from both the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia. Our group's facilities reside in both the COMET Lab in EE and the SOS Lab in CS. The current research emphasis is the design and analytical evaluation of techniques used to ensure that emerging network systems are secure and robust to a variety of anomalous (extreme) network conditions.

Our group's main focus is the use of a wide variety of analytical techniques (signal processing, graph theory, algorithms, control theory, queueing theory, optimization, and stochastic modeling) that enable us to explore networks scaled to ultra-large sizes under irregular conditions that are difficult to induce within simulation and experimentation. We also perform simulation and experimentation to provide additional support to our theoretical findings.

Currently, our research agenda is driven by two fundamental principles:

• Distribution/Decentralization: Centralized systems are inherently more prone to single points of failure, yet are often preferred because the design and implementation are simpler to understand. Our research focuses on developing and evaluating distributed techniques that can be safely and easily implemented in practice.
• Security and Resilience: Communication systems traditionally were designed assuming the various distributed components could be trusted to operate correctly. Increasingly, this is seen to not be the case. We are looking into how distributed network components can validate the correctness of their communicating counterparts. Also, we are looking at how distribution and decentralization can inherently be used to provide additional security from attacks.

Our research focuses on application, transport, network, and data-link challenges in the following networks:

• Internet-based technologies (Multimedia networking, Content Distribution)
• Wireless Networks (e.g., 802.11)
• Sensor Networks

We are grateful to the funding contributions provided by: NSF, DARPA, NSA, DoE, Cisco, Intel, IBM, Lucent and Microsoft Research

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