Disruptive Internet Research

Hui Zhang

Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

The Internet is one of the most successful technology achievements. In 30 years, the Internet has grown from a small experimental network that served as a playground for researchers to a global infrastructure that connects hundreds of millions of people. IP, the technical foundation of Internet, is widely regarded, by both the general and technical communities, to be the convergence technology layer for all communication infrastructures and services. There is the implicit assumption that radical new solutions are not needed or have little chance of ever being deployed.

In this talk, I will argue that there is an urgent need to pursue technical approaches that can dramatically enhance the scalability, robustness, security, and manageability of the network. I will discuss potential disruptive Internet research directions and some of our current efforts in pursueing these directions

Biography

Hui Zhang is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His current projects are exploring new approaches that can dramatically enhance the scalability, robustness, security, and manageability of broadband access networks, enterprise networks, and the Internet. He has done research on packet-scheduling, multicast, traffic management, admission control, and peer-to-peer systems.

Professor Zhang received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996 and the Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 2000. He held the CMU SCS Finmeccanica Chair from 1998 to 2002. He was the Chief Technical Officer of Turin Networks in 2000-2003.