Students Earn Multiple Awards at Great Plains Network Meeting

EECS doctoral students received two out of the three top awards, including first place, in the Graduate Poster Presentation at The Great Plains Network Annual Meeting (GPN 2012).The two-day conference, held earlier this month in Kansas City, brought together leading researchers from across the Midwest to explore critical technology challenges facing industry.

"These awards continue the tradition of EECS graduate students receiving recognition for the quality of their research," said Associate Chair for EECS Graduate Programs Victor Frost, Distinguished Professor of EECS.

Egemen Cetinkaya won first place for “Resilience of Backbone Provider Networks,” which was co-authored by former Ph.D. graduate Justin P. Rohrer. Since its route greatly impacts the speed and security of communication, models of links, nodes, and other physical elements in a network are critical. Simulations provide a better understanding of a network’s ability to withstand attacks and natural disasters. Cetinkaya shows that physical topologies have significantly different characteristics from traffic engineering and router-level overlays, which are more commonly used. While more complex and difficult to recreate, physical topology models are important in the development of future resilient networks.  

Earning third place for “A Comparative Simulation Study of Transport Protocols,” Truc Anh Nguyen examined how to better control congestion on increasingly crowded networks. Nguyen, along with co-authors EECS Ph.D. student Siddharth Gangadhar and MS students Greeshma Umpathi and Kamakshi Pathapati, explored variants of the existing Transmission Control Protocols (TCP) that were developed for different scenarios: NewReno being the de facto standard of the current Internet, Westwood serving wireless networks, Vegas for high bandwidth delay product networks, and SCPS-TP for space communications. Common transport layer metrics such as goodput and delay were used in addition to congestion control metrics such as the congestion window and slow start threshold.

EECS Associate Professor James P.G. Sterbenz supervised both student research projects as part of the ResiliNets research group and Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation (GpENI). Sterbenz is leading the international GpENI collaboration to build research infrastructure able to support experiments on the architecture of the Future Internet. The National Science Foundation FIND (Future Internet Design) and GENI (Global Environments for Network Innovation) programs and the EU FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) Programme are funding the ResiliNets initiative.

“I'm fortunate to have an outstanding group of graduate students that execute the sponsored research in the ResiliNets group. I'm proud that their hard work has been recognized by these awards,” said Sterbenz.