Abstract:

In the course of developing Caltech's FAST TCP algorithm from a set of equations into a record-breaking protocol, many testing and evaluation tools have been used. These have ranged from highly idealised mathematical models, through simulation and emulation all the way to intercontinental testing. However, one "level of abstraction" was missing: a Wide Area Network which was entirely under the researchers' control, and which could be monitered and instrumented in detail. To this end, Steven Low and his colleagues have built WAN-in-Lab, a complete wide area network with 28,000km of 2.5Gbps links, all in a single laboratory.

WAN-in-Lab is now an open testbed for transport layer researchers to test new protocols on a standard set of test scenarios. This talk will describe how and why WAN-in-Lab can be used, and describe some of the techniques used in its construction.

The talks will also outline some other networking research in Caltech, including modelling the stability of protocols, algorithms for peer-to-peer networks, BGP routing, and applications of game theory.

Speaker Biography

Lachlan Andrew has been in Steven Low's group at Caltech since 2005. He received a BSc, BE and PhD from the university of Melbourne in 1992, 1993 and 1996. He then taught communication networking at RMIT for 18 months before returning to Melbourne University to work on teletraffic analysis of wireless networks. Since then he has worked in medium access control, routing, simulation techniques and resource allocation, but his primary focus has been on flow control algorithms. He is a member of the IET and a senior member of the IEEE.

http://netlab.caltech.edu/~lachlan/images/Lachlan.jpg