Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The Internet is a revolutionary technology that changes our life dramatically. Business and individuals have benefited much from traditional Internet applications, including email, www, etc. The Internet has evolved over the past decades. Nowadays, it is moving forward in several aspects. In terms of access technology, relatively low-rate asymmetric access (such as the 1.5 Mbps ADSL) is migrating to high-rate symmetric technologies (such as the 50 Mbps VDSL2). In terms of Internet applications, more and more real-time applications, such as large-scale online gaming and online interactive television, are emerging. Despite the popularity of the Internet, network malfunctions are not uncommon. Physical failures are relatively frequent in the fiber-optic networks that form the core of the Internet: a top-tier carrier will, on average, experience one fiber failure every three hours. Of course, simple congestion events are even more common than failures. Thus, network resilience, the ability to recover from network malfunctions, has been a very important issue in the Internet. Most of the existing resilience mechanisms were designed for non-real-time applications with low-rate access. With the migration from low-rate access to high-rate symmetric technologies and the appearance of more and more real-time applications, the resilience mechanisms in the Internet need to evolve accordingly. Our research is focused on efficient resilience mechanisms for real-time applications in the transitioning Internet. Our vision is that the mechanism to be proposed would be a "multi-layer" approach.