DIMACS Workshop on Designing Networks for Manageability

Month: November 2009

Date: November 12--13

Name: DIMACS Workshop on Designing Networks for Manageability

Location: University Inn and Conference Center at Rutgers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Short Description

Network management is the continuous process of monitoring a network to detect and diagnose problems, and tuning the configuration of the underlying protocols and mechanisms to fix them. However, today's network architectures were not designed with these tasks in mind. As a result, managing data networks is, at best, a black art practiced by an increasingly overwhelmed community of network administrators. In recent years, a variety of theoretical techniques (e.g., anomaly detection, streaming algorithms, tomography, and optimization theory) have helped network administrators run their networks more effectively. Much research on network management has (understandably) worked within the limitations of the existing networking technology. However, today's measurement data, network protocols, and router mechanisms often induce management problems that are unnecessarily difficult (or even impossible) to solve. Rather than creating new ways to retrofit network management on the existing infrastructure, this workshop focuses on the clean-slate design of network architectures with management challenges in mind from the beginning. The workshop aims to understand the limitations of supporting network management on top of today's technology, to identify the algorithmic challenges in network management, and propose new designs that induce management problems that have better, and computationally easier, solutions.

Organizers

Mauricio Resende, AT&T Labs, mgcr@research.att.com; Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University, jrex at cs.princeton.edu. Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/SpecialYears/2007_AFI/. Algorithmic Foundations of the Internet.

Local Arrangements

Nicole Clark, DIMACS Center, nicolec@dimacs.rutgers.edu, 732-445-5928; http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/DesigningNetworks/.