Understanding the Internet: modelling communications networks

Contact:
Dr Costas Constantinou
Communications Engineering Group
Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering (EECE)
School of Engineering
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT, United Kingdom

Email: informatics-crn-enquiries[at]cs.bham.ac.uk
Website: http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/com_gr/index.htm

Data transmission over the Internet is known to result in heavy losses due to isolated rare events despite the fact that, on average, the network does not reach its congestion threshold. This clearly indicates the need to model and understand the early signs of congestion. This research aims to build and solve a new class of models describing the data loss in realistic networks using suitable approximations typical of theoretical physics approaches.

The research programme has four main objectives: to formulate a network model considering the presence of the routing protocol; to describe typical network congestion events by analysing the network performance metrics; to study the onset of congestion due to rare events, such as a sudden high surge in external traffic load; and to identify the features of current routing protocols that improve network resilience.

In an exciting collaboration with industry, a new way of routing data for computer networks such as the Internet) was invented at the University of Birmingham. Resilient Recursive Routing, or R³, is capable of being simultaneously robust to failures, adaptive to congestion and scalable.