overview.html

Network Routing

Proposed Topics

Important: the papers and topics listed below as offered as suggestions to get you thinking. New papers may have appeared on these topics and you should check the latest works before you start thinking of new ideas (to avoid rethinking of other people's ideas).

I often relate the topics to papers I have been part of, not out of vanity, but to help you get the perspective I have on the topic, before you discuss it with me. Also, you can use the literature listed in this paper to look for more work forward and backward in time.
In most cases, there are most recent and most likely better papers in these topics.

Detecting malware on routers
Presented by Ahmad Darki on the first class. Slides will become available.
Key idea: Safeguarding one’s router has received very little attention despite a plethora of malware specifically designed to compromise routers, which has emerged more recently. Here, we propose a systematic approach to distinguish a router in- fected by malware versus a healthy router. Our key novelty is that we analyze the behavior of the router, thus not re- lying on binary signatures (like anti-virus software for computers). Our contribution is two fold. First, we develop a non-trivial emulation capability, RoutePro, to observe the behavior of healthy and infected routers. RoutePro allows to instantiate a virtual router with or without malware and feed it a pre-recorded data trace. In addition, we have collected 820 router-specific malware binaries and an initial set of real data traces. RoutePro monitors the behavior at multiple layers including: OS system calls, process information, and the network layer. Second, using RoutePro, we provide initial evidence that a behavior-based method can distinguish between infected and healthy routers.
HOT: This is a very interesting topic in the general Internet of Things space.

BGP related topics

Model and Generate realistic BGP graphs

Suggested reading:
Yihua He, Michalis Faloutsos, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Marek Chrobak: Obtaining Provably Legitimate Internet Topologies. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 20(1): 271-284 (2012)
"Policy-Aware Topologies for Efficient Inter-Domain Routing Evaluations" Yihua He and Michalis Faloutsos and Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy and Marek Chrobak IEEE INFOCOM 2008 Mini-Conference, Phoenix, AZ, USA, April 2008.
Y. He et al "A systematic framework for unearthing the missing links: Measurements and Impact" NSDI 07 (email yhe@cs for preprint)
On the Hierarchical Structure of the Logical Internet Graph, ,
Z. Ge, D.R. Figueiredo, S. Jaiwal, L.Gao
ITCOM'2001.
Lixin Gao, "On Inferring Autonomous System Relationships in the Internet "
Global Internet Symposium in Globecom 2001
V. Krishnamurhty et al, Reducing Large Internet Topologies for Faster Simulations Proceedings of IFIP Networking 2005, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, May 2-6, 2005> (for additional info: www.cs.ucr.edu/~vkrish/)

Datamine and model BGP updates

"BGP-lens: Patterns and Anomalies in Internet Routing Updates" B. A. Prakash, N. Valler, et al. ACM SIGKDD'09, industrial track, Paris 2009.
Li et al., An Internet Routing Forensics Framework for Discovering Rules of abnormal BGP events, Computer COmmunicatoin Review, vol 35, No. 5, 2005 (I have hardcopy)
Realistic BGP Traffic for Test Labs. Olaf Maennel and Anja Feldmann
http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/sigcomm2002/papers/bgplab.html
Siganos and Faloutsos. "BGP Routing: A study at Large Time Scale"Global Internet Symposium, Taipei, Taiwan, November 17-21, 2002

Rumor, instability, and virus propagation

Non-Binary Information Propagation: Modeling BGP Routing Churn, Nicholas Valler, M. Butkiewicz, B. Aditya Prakash, Michalis Faloutsos, Christos Faloutsos In Network Science for Communication Networks, NetSciCom 2011, (colocated with INFOCOM 2011)
HOT: I have some very specific ideas in this direction that could form a nice simulation/theoretical problem.
Xuetao Wei, Nicholas Valler, B. Aditya Prakash, Iulian Neamtiu, Michalis Faloutsos, Christos Faloutsos: Competing Memes Propagation on Networks: A Network Science Perspective. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 31(6): 1049-1060 (2013)
Homophily in Application Layer and its Usage in Traffic Classification, B. Gallagher, Marios Iliofotou, T. Eliassi-Rad, and M. Faloutsos. In IEEE INFOCOM (mini-conference), March 2010.
HOT: I have some very specific ideas in this direction that could form a nice simulation/theoretical problem.
- Information Survival Threshold in Sensor and P2P Networks D. Chakrabarti, J. Leskovec, C. Faloutsos, S. Madden, C. Guestrin and M. Faloutsos
IEEE INFOCOM 2007, Anchorage, Alaska.
- "CPMC: An Efficient Proximity Malware Coping Scheme in Smartphone-based Mobile Networks"
Feng Li, IUPUI; Yinying Yang, Florida Atlantic University; Jie Wu, in INFOCOM 2010
Epidemic Spread in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Determining the Tipping Point Nicholas Valler, B. Aditya Prakash, Hanghang Tong, Michalis Faloutsos, Christos Faloutsos IFIP NETWORKING 2011, Valencia

Datamine communication graphs: who is talking to whom
Communication graphs: IP source-destination graphs, telephone call graph, Ebay buyers and sellers etc

Model the properties of communication graphs
Detect abmormalities and outliers
Applications: intrusion detection, abnormal interconnections

A few related papers:

"Profiling-by-Association: A Resilient Traffic Profiling Solution for the Internet Backbone." Marios Iliofotou, B. Gallagher, T. Eliassi-Rad, G. Xie, and M. Faloutsos. ACM CoNEXT, December 2010.

Ad Hoc Routing
This is a bit of an overworked area. It may be hard to find something truly novel but I am looking forward to being surprised, come and talk to me.

Scalable ad hoc routing: the feasibility of dynamic addresses in ad hoc or clustering or something else?

Examine the behavior of dynamic addressing: how often do address need to change etc
Propose solutions for making dynmic addressing feasible
Theoretical analysis and bounds
Suggested reading: "Scalable Ad Hoc Routing: The Case for Dynamic Addressing "
J. Eriksson, M. Faloutsos, S. V. Krishnamurthy
IEEE INFOCOM 2004, Hong Kong, 2004.
Self-Organizing Hierarchical Routing for Scalable Ad Hoc Networking, Rice Univ, Computer Science Technical Report TR04-433

Use of multiple frequencies for routing in ad hoc networks

Can this increase the performance
How can I allocate frequencies to nodes, links or packets
How can I optimize routing and frequency allocation together?
Suggested Reading:
- Interference-Aware Channel Assignment in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks
  Krishna Ramachandran, Elizabeth Belding-Royer, Kevin Almeroth, Milind Buddhikot INFOCOM 2006.
- A Cognitive radio approach for usage of Cirtual unlicensed spectrum Cabric et al, (pdf:http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Publications/2005/PRESENTATIONS/d.cabric/IST_paper_final_411.pdf)
Spectrum Management:The Killer Application of ad hoc and mesh netowrking, J. Stine, (I have hardcopy)

OLD TOPICS

Experiments with real CISCO routers

Setup and configuration
Execution of simple experiments
Performance measurement

Simulations with BGP SSFNet, DaSSFNet

Evaluate finetune BGp performance
Evaluate convergence of BGP
Identify pathological cases
Suggested reading: Premore, Griffin, ICNP 2001 paper

Analyze and model real BGP tables

Find patterns regularities etc
Suggested: Feldmann's paper above.
Slowing Routing Table Growth by Filtering Based on Address Allocation Policies (2001)
Steve Bellovin, Randy Bush, Timothy G. Griffin, Jennifer Rexford

Ad Hoc related topics

Use of hiearchical cluster-based routing in ad hoc networks
Survey on ad hoc routing protocols
Multicast and broadcast routing in ad hoc

Suggested reading: "Power Adaptive Broadcasting with Local Information in Ad Hoc Networks"
Chen, X., Faloutsos, M., and Krishnamurthy S.V.,
IEEE ICNP 2003
S.Y.Ni, Y.C.Tseng, Y.S.Chen and J.P.Sheu, “The Broadcast
Storm Problem in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network”, Proc. of ACM MOBICOM,
1999.

Sensor networks

Efficient reporting - Data fusion

Suggested reading: Yuan W., Krishnamurthy S.V ., and Tripathi, S.K., -- Synchronization of Multiple Levels of Data Fusion in Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE GLOBECOM 2003

To be continued...

Mutlicast Routing

The cost of application layer multicast routing

Kou Markovsky and Berman, A Fast Algorithm for {S}teiner Trees", ^M
"Acta Informatica, Springer-Verlag" volume 15, 1981
Talk to me for more...