Title: Timely, Reliable, and Cost-Effective Internet Transport Service using Structured Overlay Networks

Abstract: Emerging applications such as remote manipulation, collaborative virtual reality, or remote robotic surgery require communication that is both timely and reliable, but the Internet natively supports only communication that is either completely reliable with no timeliness guarantees (e.g. TCP) or timely with only best-effort reliability (e.g. UDP). We present an overlay transport service that can provide highly reliable communication while meeting stringent timeliness guarantees (e.g. 130ms round-trip latency across the US) over the Internet. To enable routing schemes that can support the necessary timeliness and reliability, we introduce dissemination graphs, providing a unified framework for specifying routing schemes ranging from a single path, to multiple disjoint paths, to arbitrary graphs. Based on an extensive analysis of real-world network data, we develop a timely dissemination-graph-based routing method that can add targeted redundancy in problematic areas of the network. We show that this approach can cover close to 99% of the performance gap between a traditional single-path approach and an optimal (but prohibitively expensive) scheme. Joint work with Amy Babay, Emily Wagner, and Michael Dinitz

Presenter: Professor Yair Amir

Yair Amir is Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Distributed Systems and Networks (DSN) lab at Johns Hopkins University. From June 2015 to June 2018, he served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science. His goal is to invent resilient, performant and secure distributed systems that make a difference, collecting friends along the way.

Dr. Amir holds B.Sc. (1985) and M.Sc. (1990) from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D (1995) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel