Subject: Internet Multipath Routing Games Period: april - september 2012
Supervisor: Stefano Secci (LIP6) Description
A viable path toward a more resilient future Internet is to increase the Internet path diversity at many levels: access networks, datacenter networks, content providers and Internet carrier providers. A number of protocols and traffic engineering algorithms have been defined to efficiently manage the Internet path diversity. At the IETF, standardized protocols include the Multipath TCP protocol, the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol, the Transparent Interconnection of a Lot of Links Protocol, and the Multipath BGP mode. The integration of traffic engineering methods within these protocol architectures being out of scope of the IETF, many compatible procedures have been proposed.
At each level of the Internet (access, edge, transit), different actors can profit from augmented path diversity: Internet users, Cloud virtual machines, edge networks and carrier networks. The independency of these actors and the strategic interaction between them manifests with selfish unilateral routing and multipath transmissions, hence their routing decision problem can be modeled with game theory. The routing problem at each level taken apart has already been studied in Refs. 1 (MP-TCP), 2 (LISP-TE) and 3 (BGP-TE), so as to define advanced traffic engineering and routing coordination methods.
The objective of this research internship is to study the Internet multipath routing game involving the three routing levels all together, influenced in a hierarchical way to allow, for instance, an Internet user to select the loose Internet transit path for its folows, or an edge network to influence routing across peering links. A Stackelberg competition (Ref. 4) can model the hierarchical Internet routing game across the different routing levels. The algorithmic game theory solution will need to be tested and compared to existing methods.
Requirements: Candidates should not be afraid by mathematics, operations research, optimization, game theory, graph theory and algorithm complexity.
Compensation: 450 €/month.
References
1. S. Secci et al., "Peering Equilibrium MultiPath Routing: a game theory
framework for Internet peering settlements", IEEE/ACM Trans on Netw., 2011.
http://www-phare.lip6.fr/~secci/papers/SeRoPaPaMa-ToN-11.pdf
2. S. Secci et al., "Resilient Traffic Engineering in a Transit-Edge Separated Internet Routing", in Proc. of ICC 2011.
http://www-phare.lip6.fr/~secci/papers/SeLiRaJa-ICC11.pdf
3. SC. Nguyen et al., "Strategic Evaluation of Performance-Cost Trade-offs in a Multipath TCP Multihoming Context", in Proc. of IEEE ICC 2012.
http://www-phare.lip6.fr/~secci/papers/NgNgPuSe-ICC12.pdf 4. Stackelberg competition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stackelberg_competition
