NeTS-NBD: Expressive Resource Specification and Discovery in Configurable Networks

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Emerging configurable networks such as large-scale overlays, distributed testbeds, and sensor networks comprise complex, time-varying sets of available resources and network conditions. Also, distributed applications atop such networks have increasingly complex requirements on resources they wish to utilize. Examples include: identifying and actuating cameras to track an object's expected trajectory through a monitored space; scheduling an overlay multicast file transfer across the Grid; or embedding a network experiment with specific resource constraints into PlanetLab. The PIs study challenges common to these settings that arise when application-specific requirements must be instantiated onto a large-scale configurable network. Existing methods are not generally capable of characterizing network conditions and application requirements at an appropriate level of detail that balances the amount of network measurements and the imprecision of a coarse-grained representation. The PIs are improving this state of affairs by pursuing work along two complimentary dimensions: (1) the study of two novel, formal representations of application requirements and network conditions that are approximate, tunable, and general-purpose, and (2) the development of efficient algorithms and techniques for the realization of application requirements given a particular network setting. The PIs are addressing new questions such as how to efficiently map an application onto a configurable network while satisfying the target requirements, and how to conduct a set of minimal network measurements that are sufficient to obtain a given embedding of an application and its requirements. The PIs anticipate that the proposed work will provide a set of useful building blocks that can improve the design and performance of networked applications, and can help inform the design of future networks. Their intent is to foster productive discussion across research groups about how best to build components of toolkits applicable across a diverse set of current and future configurable networks.