QNL: QoS Networking Laboratory  

People

Faculty
Ibrahim Matta

Students
Liang Guo
Alberto Medina

Mission
 

The goal of this laboratory is to promote experimental systems research in networking, in particular research toward differentiated qualities of service. In order to support this research we must develop and maintain an experimental computing and communications facility. The laboratory will be seeded with sufficient equipment to launch a small number of initial investigations and we expect that results from these early investigations will provide the leverage needed to grow the lab. Although the purpose of the lab is to conduct fundamental systems research, many of our efforts will be motivated by the need to support one or more real-world applications. In some cases members of the lab will directly engage in applications work to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying systems issues. A critical component in these early stages of the lab is the development of sufficient systems software infrastructure to support the initial research. To this end a number of the early projects involve developing, installing and testing systems software implementations. 

Representative areas of research interest are: 

1. The design and analysis of algorithms for routing of flows with quality-of-service requirements. 
2. The design and analysis of algorithms for scheduling of web requests.

 Three of the motivating applications for much of the current work are: 

1. Audio- and video-conferencing
2. Distance lecturing
3. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

Facilities

The lab will initially consist of:

PCs with Ethernet/ATM/wireless NICs
Ethernet hubs
ATM switch
Laptops
Linux and FreeBSD operating systems

Projects

Quality of Service Network Architectures

This work involves: (1) the design and implementation of traffic control mechanisms for dynamic resource allocation, application-specific networking support, and network-aware adaptive applications; (2) the use of traffic measurements to guide the design and implementation of computer-aided performance prediction tools. 
 

Multimedia Applications
Multimedia applications have dual value: (1) they allow the development of applications which can potentially be used in a variety of settings (e.g., collaboration, teaching) and the investigation of all the related software development issues; (2) they can provide a workload for the QoS work described above.