The DNA Lab's research is
broadly classified into three areas of network and performance-related
work. Note that many of our projects fall under several areas (e.g.,
resilient wireless sensor networks):
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Network Resilience and Security:
Today's operational networks are designed to handle the
traffic that occurs under "normal" circumstances. Our research
focuses on what can be done to keep networks operational under more
extraordinary circumstances. The extraordinary circumstances our research
focuses on range from everything as likely as a flash crowd (sudden,
unanticipated popularity of some on-line data) to intentional attacks by
adversaries intended to disrupt network service to major catastrophes that
might disrupt physical operations of networks.
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Servers and Scheduling:
There are many systems that are designed to simultaneously support a diverse
suite of applications. These systems are grown by drawing together commodity
components that must then jointly host the set of applications. Our
research explores how these servers should coordinate and schedule the
various jobs that arrive at the system. We are interested in optimizing a
wide range of possible performance measures, ranging from the more
traditional, like minimizing the average job completion time, to more
novel, such as minimizing the energy consumed by the serving system.
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802.11 Wireless:
The 802.11 standard is quickly becoming the de facto means for wireless
communication in a variety of environments, ranging from infrastructure
(hotspot) communciation to
wireless sensor net communication. However, much work remains to be done
to accurately model this complex protocol, as well as how to adapt it to
operate effectively in bandwidth-competetive or adversarial
environments.
Previous areas of interest have included: