CSC News

September 13, 2006

Rouskas & Dutta Collaborate with RTI on Next Generation Internet Research

Drs. George Rouskas and Rudra Dutta have collaborated with the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to obtain funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) of $400,000 for their research proposal titled “NeTS-FIND: The SILO Architecture for Services Integration, Control, and Optimization for the Future Internet.” 
 
The RTI research team includes two Ph.D graduates from NC State, Drs. Ilia Baldine (who studied under Rouskas) and Arnold Bragg.
 
This is one of a very limited number of NSF awards this year targeted at defining what the architecture of the Internet will look like in 20 years.
 
The award, which includes $220,000 for the NCSU researchers and $180,000 for the RTI researchers, will run from September 15, 2006 through August 31, 2008.
 
Research Abstract - The objective of this project is to formulate a formal framework for a non-layered internetworking architecture in which complex protocols are composed from elemental functional blocks in a configurable manner, and to demonstrate its potential by developing proof-of-concept prototypes.
 
We propose a new internetworking architecture that represents a significant departure from current philosophy. Building upon our experience with the design and prototyping of the Just-in-Time protocol suite, we outline a networking framework consisting of (1) building blocks of fine-grain functionality, (2) explicit support for combining elemental blocks into highly configurable complex protocols, and (3) control elements to facilitate (what is currently referred to as) cross-layer interactions. We take a holistic view of network design, allowing applications to work harmoniously with the network architecture and physical layers to select the most appropriate functional blocks and tune their behavior so as to meet the application's needs within resource availability constraints. The proposed architecture is flexible and extensible so as to foster innovation and accommodate change, it supports network convergence, it allows for the integration of security features at any point in (what is now referred to as) the networking stack, and it is positioned to take advantage of hardware-based performance-enhancing techniques.

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