A great deal of of interesting work was done in the 1970s in generalizing shortest path algorithms to a wide class of semirings also called "path algebras" or "dioids". Although the evolution of Internet Routing protocols does not seem to have taken much inspiration from this work, recent "reverse engineering" efforts have demonstrated that an algebraic approach is very useful for both understanding existing protocols and for exploring the design space of future Internet routing protocols. This course is intended teach participants the basic concepts needed to understand this approach. No previous background will be assumed. 

The first Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on December 17th, 2010. The purpose of the first edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential. 

It this talk I will start with a brief overview of the research activities of our group at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, in the areas of core network switching, body area networking, and security for wireless sensor networks. I will then focus on the specific problem of sizing buffers in core routers, highlighting constraints posed by power consumption and optical storage technology. We investigate the impact of router buffer size on the characteristics of TCP traffic and its co-existence with open-loop traffic. We propose and analyze the efficacy of techniques such as traffic conditioning and forward error correction in managing contention loss in the network core. Finally, we speculate on the feasibility of a future Internet core with near-zero buffers.

The scalability issues the global routing system has been experienc- ing over the past years have raised serious concerns in the Internet community. One of the main culprits for the rapidly growing BGP routing table is the defragmentation process of the address blocks allocated to ASes, also known as prefix deaggreation. The Internet is a complex system and understanding its behavioural evolution is certainly a challenging task. For this reason, the use of eco- nomic models can provide intuitive explanations of the complex interactions between networks that result in the aforementioned phenomenon of prefix deaggreation. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic model to analyze the incentives behind the deag- gregating strategies of the networks. Announcing more-specific prefixes in the Internet impacts the size of the global routing table and increases the network operators’ capital expenditure for rout- ing equipment capable of sustaining the growing Internet. How- ever, we prove that the ASes are driven by fundamental economic reasons towards this type of apparently harming behaviour. We find that by announcing more prefixes the originating network achieves a more predictable traffic pattern and reduces the peak levels of bandwidth consumption. We show that this happens because, both in the equilibrium point and the social welfare point, the cost re- duction achieved by smoothing the traffic distribution outweighs the additional cost incurred by the routing table expansion.

The second Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on January 19th, 2011. The purpose of the second edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential.

A frequent problem in settings where a unique resource must be shared among users is how to resolve the contention that arises when all of them must use it, but the resource allows only for one user each time. The application of efficient solutions for this problem spans a myriad of settings such as radio communication networks or databases.

Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (CSMA/ECA) is a distributed MAC protocol that allows collision-free access to the medium in WLAN. The only difference between CSMA/ECA and the well-known CSMA/CA is that the former uses a deterministic backoff after successful transmissions. Collision-free operation is reached after a transient state during which some collisions may occur. This article shows that the duration of the transient state can be shortened by appropriately setting the contention parameters. Standard absorbing Markov Chain theory is used to describe the behaviour of the system in the transient state and to predict the expected number of slots to reach the collision-free operation.

The seminar will cover essential aspects of tech-based entrepreneurship, with special regard to ventures in the field of ICTs.

Resources for entrepreneurs at UC3M within the Campus del Emprendedor UC3M Programme will be detailed. An inspiring speech by young entrepreneurs from our Business Incubator will stimulate a discussion with attendees.

Some among the most widespread applications of the Internet (real-time streaming multimedia applications) are based on packet exchanges that assume a very low packet delay. In order to offer some form of better service to this kind of traffic some architectural frameworks have been proposed, in which traffic sources obey some form of constraints on the maximum number of packets sent in every time interval, in which traffic is subdivided into classes, and where at any node all packets are served taking only into account the class to which they belong to. For these networks an open issue is their stability, that is the possibility to derive finite bounds to packet delay and queue size at each node.

Cloud computing has great potential to change how enterprises run and manage their IT systems. Cloud computing platforms provide customers with flexible, on demand resources at low cost. However, while existing offerings are useful for providing basic computation and storage resources, they fail to provide the security and network controls that enterprise customers need. The CloudNet architecture provides more comprehensive control over network resources and security for users by utilizing Virtual Private Networks to securely and seamlessly link cloud and enterprise sites. CloudNet incorporates VM migration over WANs. CloudNet's capability for WAN migration transforms the scope of provisioning from a single data center to multiple data centers spread across the country or the world. This will open new opportunities for cross data center load balancing and dynamic application placement based on metrics like latency to users or energy cost. It also provides the foundation for a range of Disaster Recovery solutions. (The talk is based on joint work with Timothy Wood (UMass), Jacobus van der Merwe (AT&T Labs Research), and Prashant Shenoy (UMass) ).