Finding a Research Proposal

With just a few weeks left in the semester I find myself preparing for the final project in our networking class, namely the research proposal. The proposal is basically a novel concept we have come up with to solve a problem prominent in networking research, while we do not need to actually create a solution, we must propose the experiment in order to determine the results.

As yet I have not decided on a specific topic for this research project, but I feel that (as aforementioned) wireless networking holds the most promise in terms of feasible research. I will try and choose something that isn't too closely related to the area of research we are working on in the lab, but it should be an interesting assignment to work on.

The Principle Behind Research

Since we didn't have class this past Thursday, I thought I would discuss an idea that has been consistent throughout my blog for this week's post. I believe I may have been overly cynical about research in networking up to this point. After discussing this with a co-worker, I better understand the motivations behind the research I have been reading about.

Firstly, my co-worker brought to my realization that all research, not just research focused on networking, has projects that are never brought to fruition. In fact, the majority of research in general seems to be done more in a hope that it will be useful to someone at sometime. In many cases, substantial research is done by building upon the work of others, whose individual contributions may not have made the same impact.

I will try and be less cynical towards networking research, after all - in the near future the Internet may need an incredible overhaul and all the current research will be very useful indeed...

The End of the World (or at least IPv4)

Today we had an interesting discussion in class about the fact that the world is literally running out of IPv4 addresses. In fact, it is predicted that by around May of 2012 there will no longer be any available IPv4 addresses (I guess Nostradamus was right...). This leads to the interesting question of how and when IPv6 will be implemented. Of course, many new computers and devices already have IPv6 addresses, but will router configurations need to be changed? Are there tables of IP addresses that will need to be washed away and reinstated with the new IP addresses? Basically, what kind of overhead will this involve?

Also, is this another Y2K incident? Or is this a legitimate issue that needs to be looked into further so that we truly understand the repercussions? I am inclined to believe it may be an important step in history of networking, but I have a feeling it may not be as hard to convert over as it sounds. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

End to End Congestion Control

One idea that came up in the paper we read this week really stuck with me, its not a new idea, I've heard it being talked about a lot in fact, its the idea of getting people to cooperate, in this case on the internet. For me, in my current area of research, that is a very interesting control problem. What incentives can we offer people in order to persuade them to cooperate together in an environment where cooperation isn't necessarily an inherent prospect.

In the example of the Internet, the problem that the researchers were looking at was the idea of trying to get UDP connections to share bandwidth fairly with TCP connections. An initial glance at this problem clearly shows that there does not exist any incentive for UDP to cooperate on the network, there is more incentive for the connections NOT to use congestion control at all. Why should they have to lose bandwidth? What benefit does that have for them? Th authors note that social incentives could play a factor, but are unquantifiable and not very trustworthy.

One suggestion that the authors made was creating router mechanisms that detect uncooperative flows and restricting their bandwidth. This penalizes flows for not conforming to congestion control. In looking toward my area of research, the idea of incentives to control a system seems very intriguing and I would like to read more research papers that focus on this idea in other applications.

Scalable TCP (and the Future of Networks)

From the Scalable TCP paper and other networking papers I've been reading, many researchers seem to be doing research for an Internet that doesn't quite exist yet. For example, while Scalable TCP may only be useful for a small group of users in the current internet, as High Speed Internet becomes more and more popular, and it may take many years or decades to do so, I am sure Scalable TCP, and related research, will become more useful to a larger number of users. However, by that time, more and more researchers will probably be shifting their focus to interplanetary networks, which may or may not ever come to fruition (but it is still looking toward the future).

Of course, this may seem like an inherent part of research (looking towards the future), but only in these recent papers has the idea really stood out to me. For our networking research, we are looking at Network Tomography as a tool to infer Network Topology. The main reason why researchers claim to use this tool, instead of more active probing tools like traceroute, is in order to be able to continue mapping the Internet while the routers and users become less and less cooperative with network measurement tools. Essentially, it seems that the researchers are preparing for a future Internet where little or no cooperation will exist.

Note that I stated that the researchers claim this is their primary reason for research, but my professors believe that the networking techniques that they are proposing are very useful for mapping networks that certain users, such as governments, etc., don't want mapped. An idea that is useful today, while still preparing for the future. So now I ask myself where I should focus my research. Should I take a gamble and focus on research that may or may not be useful in the future? Or should I focus on research that is important for people now and may have future implications? Just some interesting things I have been thinking about.