Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Fall 2007

On the Many Facets of Neighbor Selection for Overlay Networks

Speaker: Nikolaos Laoutaris

Affiliation: Telefonica Research

Date: Monday, December 10, 2007

Talk: 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m., 366 WVH

Abstract

A foundational issue underlying many overlay network applications is that of connectivity management, i.e., how to fold new arrivals into an existing overlay, or re-wire to cope with changing network conditions and node churn. In this talk I will try to outline the design space of neighbor selection strategies by looking at specific instances drawn from different applications like overlay routing, P2P file sharing, and broadcast systems. These applications give rise to different flavors of the neighbor selection problem, which differ in multiple aspects including the scope of communication (1-to-1, 1-to-many, many-to-many), the available information (local or global), the utility mode (selfish or cooperative), and the deciding entity (either the node or the network itself). This rich family of problems carries with it several new research challenges and opportunities for improving the performance of existing simplistic random and greedy local strategies without sacrificing their practicality.

Based on joined work with G. Smaragdakis, A. Bestavros, J. Byers, S.-H. Teng (Boston University), R. Rajaraman, R. Sundaram (Northeastern University), M. Roussopoulos (Harvard University), D. Carra, P. Michardi (Institut Eurecom)

Brief Biography

Nikolaos Laoutaris is a research scientist at Telefonica Research in Barcelona. Prior to joining the Barcelona lab he was a postdoc fellow at Harvard University and a Marie Curie postdoc fellow at Boston University. He got his PhD in computer science from the University of Athens in 2004. Email: nikos@tid.es, Web: http://research.tid.es/nikos/