ABRAHAM (IBRAHIM) MATTA *
Professor
Computer Science Department
College of Arts & Sciences
Boston University
111 Cummington Street, MCS-271
Boston, MA 02215, USA

Affiliated with the Hariri Institute for Computing, and with Systems Engineering

Affiliated with RISCS: Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security & CISE: Center for Information and Systems Engineering.

Tel : (617) 358-1062
Fax: (617) 353-6457
Email: matta(at)bu(dot)edu

* Ibrahim is a variant form of Abraham. My "official" first name is "Abraham", but call me either. I try to use only "Ibrahim" on all my research papers to avoid confusion :)

At a Glance: [teaching][research] [publications] [biography]

[(My) View of a PhD Journey] [Reviewing Advice]
[BU Today Article on Mesh Networks]

 

GAANN Doctoral Fellowships and Other Graduate Fellowships are available.

If you are interested in these opportunities, please apply to the graduate program at Boston University, Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Teaching:

Current & Recent Activities:

Research Interests:

Current projects involve clean-slate architectures (see the RINA website), configurable protocol design, stability and compositional analysis, data management, and green networking.

[RINA is funded by the National Science Foundation] [RINA in the News]

Research Contributions at a Glance:

Ibrahim Matta's contributions span Internet and wireless architectures and protocols. He is most known for his work on traffic routing, congestion control, internetworking wired and wireless technologies, and the development of network evaluation tools.  He introduced demand-supply routing (termed "load profiling''), and developed search space reduction and algorithmic techniques for QoS (Quality-of-Service) routing. He applied shortest-job-first scheduling inside the network, and introduced history in congestion control to ensure high-speed operation. He developed novel loss inference techniques to effectively integrate wireless segments. And he made his software publicly available, including BRITE, a widely used generator of synthetic Internet topologies.

Most recently, Matta’s work defined a new class of attacks, known as RoQ (Reduction-of-Quality) attacks, elevated energy as first-class concern in protocol design, elevated mobility as a resource to be optimized and leveraged in sensor and DTN (Disruption Tolerant) networks, and analyzed safe compositions and interactions in policy routing and transport over next-generation wireless networks. He is currently developing and analyzing clean-slate recursive network architectures with applications to the Internet and mobile networks.

Selected Recent Publications:

[Green Network Design]

Luca Chiaraviglio, and Ibrahim Matta. GreenCoop: Cooperative Green Routing with Energy-efficient Servers. In the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Energy-Efficient Computing and Networking, University of Passau, Germany, April 2010. [PDF] Follow-up work appears in Technical Report BUCS-2010-008: "A Green Distributed Cooperation for Network and Content Management," March 31, 2010. [long version: PDF] [shorter slightly revised version: PDF, just accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2011 Green Communications and Networking Workshop]. BU-CS is a collaborating institution of the EU TREND project of the Network of Excellence on Energy Efficient Networking.

[Energy-aware Transport]

Niky Riga, Ibrahim Matta, Alberto Medina, Craig Partridge, and Jason Redi. JTP: An Energy-conscious Transport Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of  CoNEXT Conference, New York, NY, December 2007. [PDF] [Patent Application] Patent awarded 4/12/2011.

[Principled Protocol Design]

John Day, Ibrahim Matta, and Karim Mattar. "Networking is IPC": A Guiding Principle to a Better Internet. In Proceedings of ReArch'08 - Re-Architecting the Internet, Madrid, SPAIN, December 2008. Co-located with ACM CoNEXT 2008. [PDF] Follow-up work can be found on the RINA website.

[Mobile Data Management]

Hany Morcos, George Atia, Azer Bestavros, and Ibrahim Matta. An Information Theoretic Framework for Field Monitoring Using Autonomously Mobile Sensors. Ad Hoc Networks: Special Issue on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, 2010. [PDF] See also our Med-Hoc-Net 2010 paper [PDF] (Best Paper Award), our DCOSS 2008 paper [PDF] (Best Paper Award, Applications Track), and our SECON 2008 paper [PDF].

[Safe Policy Routing]

Sam Epstein, Karim Mattar, and Ibrahim Matta. Principles of Safe Policy Routing Dynamics. In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'09), Princeton, NJ, October 2009. [PDF] Extended version appears in Technical Report BUCS-2009-013 with the same title, April 21, 2009. [PDF]

[Resilient Protocol Design]

Mina Guirguis, Azer Bestavros, and Ibrahim Matta. Exploiting the Transients of Adaptation for RoQ Attacks on Internet Resources. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'04), Berlin, Germany, October 2004. [PDF] Follow-up work can be found on the RoQ website.

[Resilient Distributed Caching]

Nikolaos Laoutaris, Georgios Smaragdakis, Azer Bestavros, Ibrahim Matta, and Ioannis Stavrakakis. Distributed Selfish Caching. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 18(10), October 2007. [PDF] See project page.

[Safe Network Service Composition]

Azer Bestavros, Adam Bradley, Assaf Kfoury, and Ibrahim Matta. Typed Abstraction of Complex Network Compositions. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'05), Boston, MA, November 2005. [PDF] See project page.

[Friendly High-speed Transport]

Shudong Jin, Liang Guo, Ibrahim Matta, and Azer Bestavros. A Spectrum of TCP-friendly Window-based Congestion Control Algorithms. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 11(3), June 2003. [PDF] See project page.

[Friendly Adaptive Virtualization]

Yuting Zhang, Azer Bestavros, Mina Guirguis, Ibrahim Matta, and Richard West. Friendly Virtual Machines: Leveraging a Feedback-Control Model for Application Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM/USENIX Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, Chicago, Illinois, June 2005. [PDF]

[Cross-layer Measurement]

Karim Mattar, Ashwin Sridharan, Hui Zang, Ibrahim Matta, and Azer Bestavros. TCP over CDMA2000 Networks: A Cross-Layer Measurement Study. In Proceedings of the 8th Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium, 2007. [PDF]

more >>

Selected Older Publications:

Liang Guo and Ibrahim Matta. The War between Mice and Elephants. In Proceedings of ICNP'2001: The 9th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, Riverside, CA, November 2001.

Alberto Medina, Anukool Lakhina, Ibrahim Matta, and John Byers. BRITE: An Approach to Universal Topology Generation. In Proceedings of MASCOTS '01: The International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2001.

Liang Guo, Mark Crovella, and Ibrahim Matta. How does TCP Generate Pseudo-Self-Similarity?. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems - MASCOTS '01, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2001.

Selma Yilmaz and Ibrahim Matta. On Class-Based Isolation of UDP, Short-Lived and Long-Lived TCP Flows. In Proceedings of MASCOTS '01: The International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2001.

Ibrahim Matta and Liang Guo. Differentiated Predictive Fair Service for TCP Flows. In Proceedings of ICNP'2000: The 8th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, Osaka, Japan, October 2000.

Ibrahim Matta and Liang Guo. QDMR: An Efficient QoS Dependent Multicast Routing Algorithm. Journal of Communications and Networks - Special Issue on QoS in IP Networks, 2(2):168-176, June 2000.

Jaehee Yoon, Azer Bestavros, and Ibrahim Matta. SomeCast: A Paradigm for Real-Time Adaptive Reliable Multicast. In Proceedings of RTAS'2000: The IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium, Washington, DC, May 2000.

Alberto Medina, Ibrahim Matta, and John Byers. On the Origin of Power Laws in Internet Topologies. ACM Computer Communication Review, 30(2), April 2000.

Karu Ratnam, Ibrahim Matta, and Sampath Rangarajan. Analysis of Caching-based Location Management in Personal Communication Networks. In Proceedings of ICNP '99: The 7th International Conference on Network Protocols, Toronto, Canada, November 1999.

Ibrahim Matta and Azer Bestavros. A Load Profiling Approach to Routing Guaranteed Bandwidth Flows. In Proceedings of Infocom'98: The IEEE International Conference on Computer Communication, San Francisco, CA, April 1998.

Ibrahim Matta and A. Udaya Shankar. Fast Time-Dependent Evaluation of Integrated Services Networks. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems - Special Issue on Modeling of Wired and Wireless ATM, 29(17-18):1999-2020, February 1998.

Cengiz Alaettinoglu, Ibrahim Matta, and A. Udaya Shankar. A Scalable Virtual Circuit Routing Scheme for ATM Networks. In Proceedings of ICCCN '95: The International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, pages 630-637, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 1995.

Ibrahim Matta and A. Udaya Shankar. Z-Iteration: A Simple Method for Throughput Estimation in Time-Dependent Multi-Class Systems. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS / PERFORMANCE '95, pages 126-135, Ottawa, Canada, May 1995.

Ibrahim Matta and A. Udaya Shankar. Type-of-Service Routing in Datagram Delivery Systems. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications -- Special Issue on the Internet, 13(8):1411-1425, October 1995.

A. Udaya Shankar, Cengiz Alaettinoglu, Klaudia Dussa-Zieger, and Ibrahim Matta. Transient and Steady-State Performance of Routing Protocols: Distance-Vector versus Link-State. Journal of Internetworking: Research and Experience, 6:59-87, 1995.

Short Biography:

Abraham Matta received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1995. He is a professor of computer science at Boston University. His research involves transport and routing protocols for the Internet and wireless networks; feedback-based control design and analysis; architectures for protocol design and large-scale traffic management; modeling and performance evaluation. His current projects include recursive and energy-efficient network architectures and protocols. He published over 100 peer-reviewed technical papers, and was guest co-editor of four special journal issues. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1997. He is the Technical Program Co-chair of the upcoming 2012 IEEE Online Conference on Green Communications, and the TPC co-chair of the 10th International Conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications. He has recently been the TPC chair of the IEEE ICCCN 2011 Track of Network Algorithms and Performance Evaluation, and TPC co-chair in 2011 of the flagship workshop of the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications. He served on many program committees, including those of ICNP, Infocom, MobiCom, and MobiHoc. He was on the Editorial Board of the Computer Networks Journal, General Chair of WiOpt’06, TPC co-chair of ICNP’05, TPC co-chair of SenMetrics’05, Internet Co-chair of Infocom’05, Publication Chair of Infocom’03, and Tutorial and Panel Chair of Hot Interconnects’01. He was co-organizer and TPC co-chair of the EU-US NeXtworking’03. He is a senior member of both the ACM and the IEEE.

Longer Biography:

Abraham Matta received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park  in 1995. He is a professor at the Computer Science Department of  Boston University. His research is in transport and routing protocols for the Internet and wireless networks; feedback-based control design and analysis; architectures for protocol design and large-scale traffic management; modeling and performance evaluation.

Dr. Matta published over 100 refereed technical papers, and his former PhD students hold academic and research positions in Akamai, BBN Technologies, Cisco Systems, Texas State University, among others. His research has been funded by both government agencies and the industry such as NSF, Motorola, and Sprint Labs. He was a Visiting Scientist in the Mobile Networking Systems of BBN Technologies from January 2006 to December 2007, where he had contributed to the development of a transport protocol for a low-energy radio network (called JAVeLEN) and to aspects of media-access and routing adaptations.

Dr. Matta received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1997 for his quality-of-service routing work. He was the principal investigator of an NSF special project in networking on edge traffic management. His current projects include recursive network architectures, and formal methods for safe compositions of network services (both funded by NSF).

He is the Technical Program Co-chair of the upcoming 2012 IEEE Online Conference on Green Communications, and the TPC co-chair of the 10th International Conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications.

He was guest co-editor of a special issue on Reliable Transport Protocols for Mobile Computing in the Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (February 2002), guest co-editor of a special issue on Quality of Service Routing in the IEEE Communications Magazine (June 2002), guest co-editor of a special issue on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks in the Elsevier Computer Communications Journal (September 2005), and guest co-editor of special issue on Advances in Communications and Networking in the Journal of Communications (2012). He served on the Editorial Board of the Elsevier Computer Networks Journal (COMNET) 2003-2007. He is on the Advisory Council of the IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications. He has recently been the Technical Program Chair of the IEEE ICCCN 2011 Track on Network Algorithms and Performance Evaluation, Co-chair of the IEEE Computer Communications Workshop (CCW) 2011, and Co-chair of the NSF/PNNL CyberCARD 2011 Track on Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems and Infrastructures.

Dr. Matta  served on the technical program committees of many conferences, including INFOCOM, ICNP, MobiCom, MobiHoc, GLOBECOM, and ICDCS. He was co-organizer and Technical Program Co-chair of NeXtworking 2003, a COST-IST (EU) and NSF-ANIR (USA) funded workshop in Crete, Greece. He was co-organizer and Technical Program Chair of IEEE ASWN 2004, and was on the steering committee of ASWN 2004-06. He was Technical Program Co-chair of the First International Workshop on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications (WWIC 2002), General Co-chair of WWIC 2004, and currently on the steering committee of WWIC. He wasTechnical Program Co-chair of IEEE ICNP 2005, General Chair of WiOpt 2006, Publication Chair of the NSF Computing Research Infrastructure PI Meeting 2007, Technical Program Co-chair of SenMetrics 2005, Internet Co-chair of IEEE Infocom 2005, Publication Chair of IEEE Infocom 2003, and Tutorial and Panel Chair of the 9th Hot Interconnects Symposium 2001. He served as session organizer and chair, reviewer, and panelist for NSF networking grant proposals, and was the representative of the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) for GLOBECOM 1999.

Dr. Matta is a senior member of both the ACM and the IEEE.

Long Resume: PDF

Last updated Wednesday, July 11, 2012 7:59 PM