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Thursday June 23th, 2005 - 4:30pm
Computer Laboratory > Research > Systems Research Group > NetOS > Seminars > Thursday June 23th, 2005 - 4:30pm

A Clean Slate Design Approach to Networking Research

Hui Zhang

The Internet is one of the most successful technology achievements. IP technology, the technical foundation of Internet, is widely regarded, by both the general and technical communities, to be the convergence technology layer for all communication infrastructures and services. Most networking researchers today are working on solutions that incrementally improve the Internet with the implicit assumption that radical new solutions are not needed or have no chance of ever being deployed.

In the 100x100 Clean Slate Project, we are pursueing an alternative research approach that asks the following question: given the benefit of hindsight and our current understanding of network requirements and technologies, if we were not bound by existing design decisions and would be able to design the network from first principles (a clean slate design), how should we do it? In this talk, I will first outline the research agenda of the 100x100 Clean Slate Project. I will then describe one research direction where we are re-designing the control/management planes of data networks from the ground up.

Bio

Hui Zhang is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently leading the 100x100 Clean Slate Project and the End System Multicast Project. He has done research on Internet QoS, multicast, and peer-to-peer systems.

Professor Zhang was the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996 and the Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 2000. He held the CMU SCS Finmeccanica Chair from 1998 to 2002. He was the Chief Technical Officer of Turin Networks in 2000-2003.