Dissertation topic

In general, I research next generation Internet services, distributed systems, mobile computing, and wireless networks. More specifically, my dissertation investigates techniques for improving application-level protocols, especially in wide area and mobile environments through code and data migration in combination with introspection. The below picture illustrates how code and data migration can be used to improve Internet services. Basically, code and data can be migrated to various points in the infrastructure to decrease access latency, to distribute load (either bandwidth or CPU), and to provide availability.

If code and data can be migrated anywhere in the above picture, how do we know where and when to move it? That's where introspection comes in. In my dissertation, I will be investigating methods for Internet services / application-level protocols to monitor/ predict their own behavior and to make adjustments as necessary.

Ok, that's the high-level picture of what I'm doing. For more details you should read my publications, and quals proposal (which is not yet written).

Past projects

• REAP: This project investigated simple client to server code migration to improve application-level protocols. I used existing protocols such as IMAP, LDAP, SMTP as motivation, and showed how they could be improved.
• SDS: The Berkeley Service Discovery Service was an early exploration of different techniques for doing automatic service discovery. It was done as part of the Ninja project. It is similar to the Jini Lookup service, UDDI, and others.
• NinjaMail: A small project that attempted to build a highly scalable mail server on top of the Ninja infrastructure.

Affiliated research groups

• Oceanstore: Oceanstore is an ambitious project trying to create a global-scale storage system, based on very secure encryption techniques and peer-to-peer overlay networks.
• Ninja: Ninja investigated how to build scalable Internet services using middleware.
• Iceberg: Iceberg investigated how to use Internet technologies to improve upon traditional telecommunications infrastructures.