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Speaker:        Su Wen
                University of Kentucky

Topic:          "Building Efficient Group Communication Services
                 on a Programmable Network Framework"

Date:           Monday, 25 February 2002

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F
                (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater, near lift nos. 25/26)
                HKUST

ABSTRACT:

Multicast was introduced to provide a one-to-many communication mechanism
for group communication applications.  However, current IP multicast
implementations suffer many problems such as scalability, complexity and
lack of access control. As a result, IP multicast is not widely deployed
in the Internet today.  This has led researchers to explore
application-layer multicast implementations where hosts form an overlay
topology and disseminate data through unicast.  Application layer
multicast does not rely on the deployment of network level multicast
routing. However, since applications can only infer the underlying network
information, application layer multicast often cannot achieve the same
performance as network implementations.

My research focuses on the design of a network framework that supports two
new network building block services, Lightweight Processing (LWP) modules
and Ephemeral State Processing (ESP). These building block services give
end systems greater control and insight into the network, and can be used
by applications to build efficient value-added network services.  This
framework provides a way for applications to build services with the
flexibility and control of application level designs and the robustness
and efficiency of network based implementations.  I will demonstrate how
applications can use these simple services to build an efficient multicast
implementation that reduces the amount of multicast state in the network,
relies only on unicast routing, and can be deployed incrementally. In
addition, I will show how additional services can be supported by this
framework with a layered multicast protocol built on the same multicast
structure.  I will present the performance evaluation of our ESP and
LWP-based group communication protocols, as well as the result of our
prototype implementation of the ESP system on an Intel IXP1200 network
processor.


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Biography:

Su Wen is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of
Kentucky.  She received her B.S. degree in Physics from Butler University
at Indianapolis, Indiana. Her research area is Computer Networking and her
interests include multicast protocols, programmable and active networks,
support for multimedia data delivery, mobile computing and distributed
operating systems.


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