Please have a look at the abstract below; a copy of the (sort of) final draft can be found in my publications page.

Recently network virtualization has been pushed forward by its proponents as a long-term solution to the gradual ossification problem faced by the existing Internet and proposed to be an integral part of the next-generation networking paradigm. By allowing multiple heterogeneous network architectures to cohabit on a shared physical substrate, network virtualization provides flexibility, promotes diversity, and promises security and increased manageability. However, many technical issues stand in the way of its successful realization. This article investigates the past and the state of the art in network virtualization along with the future challenges that must be addressed to realize a viable network virtualization environment.

PS: Can anyone please let me know whether I can put the final paper with ComMag formatting on my site?

A complete list of everything can be found here. As is the custom nowadays with WordPress, there is an one-click painless upgrade

Update (April 19): We (Andy and I) are in the confernce site. I am loving Rio Hopefully the presentation will go alright on Wednesday.

Update (April 22): Finished presenting my paper

The coolest thing is that I got to use the automatic upgrade feature that came with WordPress 2.7. No fuss any more. Just click on upgrade (Tools > Upgrade), wait, and you are done. Kudos to the WordPress development team. They do warn about backing up your database and files though; just to be in the safer side. And this automatic upgrade thingy is available only in WordPress 2.7 onwards.

The thesis focuses on identity management and resource allocation through virtual network embedding in the network virtualization environment. Since both the projects have already been accepted in IM and INFOCOM respectively, it was comparatively easier to put together the thesis. An overview of the thesis is given below:

Due to the existence of multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and policies, alterations to the existing Internet architecture are now limited to simple incremental updates; deployment of any new, radically different technology is next to impossible. To fend off this ossification, network virtualization has been propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm. In this talk, we provide an overview of the network virtualization environment (NVE) and address two basic problems in this emerging field of networking research.

The identity management problem is primarily concerned with ensuring interoperability across heterogeneous identifier spaces for locating and identifying end hosts in different virtual networks. We describe the architectural and the functional components of a novel identity management framework (iMark) that enables end-to-end connectivity across heterogeneous virtual networks in the NVE without revoking their autonomy.

The virtual network embedding problem deals with the mapping of virtual nodes and links onto physical network resources. We argue that the separation of the node mapping and the link mapping phases in the existing algorithms considerably reduces the solution space and degrades embedding quality. We propose coordinated node and link mapping to devise two algorithms (D-ViNE and R-ViNE) for the online version of the problem under realistic assumptions and compare their performance with the existing heuristics.

Btw, you should listen to this wonderful song by Stevie Wonder.

This year the scholarship was awarded to eight ongoing and incoming students in total. I congratulate all the fellow winners in this achievement !!!

Following is an excerpt from the school website on this scholarship:

Dr. David Ross Cheriton is a distinguished Computer Science alumnus of the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics. Dr. Cheriton received his MMath and PhD in Computer Science form Waterloo in 1974 and 1978, respectively. He is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and heads the Stanford University Distributed Systems Group. He is widely known for his extraordinary research contributions in high-performance scalable distributed systems, Internet architecture and hardware-software interaction, and the successful commercialization of his research results..

The David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarships are valued between $10,000 and $20,000 and will be awarded annually to forty to seventy full-time University of Waterloo graduate students in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer science on the basis of scholastic excellence and a demonstrated interest in research that addresses problems associated with designing and implementing efficient and reliable computing systems along with their effective integration.

These scholarships are open to Canadian and International students holding a student visa.

Note to self: Read your feeds

EuroView2008

• Future Internet Design: Dynamic (Optical) Circuit Switching, Ethernet Everywhere – B. Mukherjee (University of California, Davis, US)
• A Cognitive Routing System for the Internet – D. Papadimitriou (Alcatel-Lucent, Belgium)
• The EU Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) Activities – M. Lemke (European Commission, Belgium)
• The EMANICS Views on the Future Internet and Management Implications – G. Dreo Rodosek (Universität der Bundeswehr, Munich, Germany)
• Simple Economic Management Approaches of Overlay Traffic in Heterogeneous Internet Topologies – B. Stiller (Univerity of Zürich, Switzerland)
• Impact of Path Performance on Concurrent Multipath Transmission within Routing Overlays – K. Tutschku (National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), Japan)
• Impacts of Virtualisation on the Routing – I. El Khayat (Ericsson Aachen, Germany)
• Providing End-to-End Connectivity Across Heterogeneous Networks – S. Mies (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
• Considering Network Heterogeneity in Global Application Layer Multicast Provision – C. Hübsch (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)

BIRD2008

• Overview on 4WARD Business Ideas – Thomas Monath (Deutsche Telekom)
• 4WARD: Policy, Governance and Regulation – Jukka Salo (NSN)
• Challenges of the Future Internet World – Daniel Kofman (GET, Euro NF)
• 4WARD Innovations – Several speakers…
• Future Internet Innovations from TRILOGY Perspective – Andrea Soppera (BT)

Here goes the abstract:

Recently network virtualization has been proposed as a promising way to overcome the current ossification of the Internet by allowing multiple heterogeneous virtual networks (VNs) to coexist on a shared infrastructure. A major challenge in this respect is the VN embedding problem that deals with efficient mapping of virtual nodes and virtual links onto the substrate network resources. Since this problem is known to be NP-hard, previous research has focused on designing heuristic-based algorithms which have clear separation between the node and link mapping phases.

This paper proposes VN embedding algorithms with better coordination between the two phases. We formulate the VN embedding problem as a mixed integer program through substrate network augmentation. We then relax the integer constraints to obtain a linear program, and devise two VN embedding algorithms D-ViNE and R-ViNE using deterministic and randomized rounding techniques, respectively. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithms increase the acceptance ratio and the revenue while decreasing the cost incurred by the substrate network in the long run.

You can access a copy of the paper in the publications page along with my other works.

Some stats now: This year Infocom received 1435 papers (after post-submission withdrawals) of which 282 papers were accepted after a thorough review process. Hence the acceptance ratio would be 19.65%.

List of papers accepted into the main conference is available here.

I just found this awesome post by Ozh on the evolution of WordPress, which shows the change in the interface starting from 0.7.1 to WordPress 2.7. It’s amazing to see how far WordPress has gone in just 5 years !!!

I would like to thank the award committee to give me the opportunity and the sponsors of the conference (Silver supporter Microsoft Research, Bronze supporters CISCO, Thomson, Nokia, CONTENT NoE and Patron IBM Corp.) for making it possible.

Aside from the conference, I am also excited about my first trip to Europe. I will try to cover some more cities apart from Madrid, since a schengen visa allows free movement between a whole bunch of countries.