Network Inference using Network Coding Techniques

CENG SEMINAR SERIES"Network Inference using Network Coding Techniques"Dr. Athina MarkopoulouUniversity of California, IrvineAbstract:Monitoring is an important component in the operation of any network. We are particularly interested in a family of monitoring techniques, known as network tomography, which aim at inferring internal network characteristics by sending and collecting probe packets from the edge of the network. Prior work on network tomography considered networks that implement multicast and unicast forwarding. Independently, the network coding community advocates that additional functionality should be added to network nodes, to allow for processing of incoming packets before forwarding them. This functionality comes at the cost of additional processing but also brings the potential of significant performance benefits. In this work, we consider networks where internal nodes implement network coding and we re-visit two network tomography problems: (i) link loss inference and (ii) topology inference. We develop new techniques that make use of the network coding capabilities and we show that they improve several aspects of the inference problem (including identifiability of links, accuracy of estimation, and complexity of probe path selection) over traditional techniques. Our rationale is that if network coding is to be deployed in some networks, e.g. to bring throughput benefits, then one can exploit this opportunity to also boost the performance of other operations, such as monitoring. This is joint work with Christina Fragouli and Suhas Diggavi from EPFL, Lausanne.Bio:Athina Markopoulou is an assistant professor with the EECS Dept, UC Irvine. She received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1996. She received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees both in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, in 1998 and 2002 respectively. Prior to joining UCI, she worked at Stanford University, Sprint Advanced Tech. Labs, and Arastra, a startup, as postdoctoral research fellow, member of technical staff, and research scientist, respectively. Her research interests are in the area of networking, including voice and video over IP networks, Internet Denial-of-Service, network measurement and control, and applications of network coding techniques to networking problems.Host: Prof. Konstantinos Psounis, kpsounis@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Rosine Sarafian