Collaborative Research: Towards An Analytic Foundation for Network Architectures

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In large and complex communication networks, architectural decisions regarding functionality allocation are extremely important. The time is ripe for building a scientific foundation for network architectures, both to capitalize on unique clean-slate design opportunities (such as GENI and MANET) and to guide the evolution from existing network architectures to new ones. Such a foundation can lead to highly efficient, robust, and scalable protocols that could have a significant impact on the communications industry.The recent successes of understanding protocols as optimizers and layering as mathematical decompositions offer a promising starting point for such an analytic foundation one that is conceptually unifying, mathematically rigorous, and practically relevant. However, there is still much work to be done in developing an analytic foundation for network architectures. This research focuses on three main thrusts: Alternative architectural choices: Past mathematical results have focused on one architecture derived from a particular decomposition. There is in fact a wide range of alternative decompositions that result in different scalability, convergence, and complexity tradeoffs. This research systematically explores architectural choices using appropriate decompositions.Stochastic network dynamics: This research develops new architectural designs taking into account stochastic (rather than deterministic) network dynamics, which are critical in modeling real systems and in developing high-performance network architectures. Non-convexity and robustness: Non-convexity persists in real networks, which could lead to instability, poor performance, and impractical computational complexity. Nonetheless, most past results have been derived only for the convex case. This research explores architectural choices that are robust to non-convexity.