Arpit Gupta will present his FPO "Flexible and Scalable Systems for Network Management" on Friday, 8/31/2018 at 10 am in CS 302.

The members of his committee are as follows: Adviser: Nick Feamster; Readers: Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford, and Walter Willinger (NIKSUN Inc.); Examiners: Marshini Chetty, Kyle Jamieson, and Nick Feamster.

Everyone is invited to attend.   A copy of his thesis is available in CS 310.

Thesis abstract follows below.

Our daily lives are heavily reliant upon Internet-connected devices, services, and applications.

This reliance makes it more critical than ever that the underlying networks

they depend on be reliable, performant, and secure. At the same time, the increasing

complexity and diversity of today's devices, services, and applications have made

network management tasks more complicated than ever. Modern network management

mandates that operators can systematically monitor what is going on in their

networks (network monitoring) and use this information to take real-time preventive

or corrective actions (network control). Achieving these goals while also adhering to

the limited compute and storage resources available on modern network devices poses

signi\u000Ccant challenges.

The contribution of this dissertation is the design and implementation of two systems

that enable exible and scalable network monitoring and control. The networkmonitoring

system, Sonata, collects and analyzes network tra c to infer various network

events in real time. The network-control system, SDX, enables \u000Cne-grained

reactive control actions for interdomain tra c without disrupting the existing routing

protocols. For each of these two systems, the dissertation focuses on (i) the ab-

stractions that allow network operators to express 

exible programs for both network

monitoring and control; (ii) the algorithms that make the best use of limited compute

and storage resources; and (iii) the systems that combine the high-level abstractions

and the low-level algorithms and can be deployed in production settings.

The lessons learned from this dissertation can help us design next-generation

network-management systems. More concretely, unlike existing systems that rely

solely on a single device-type, this dissertation shows that designing systems that can

pool resources from a heterogeneous set of devices (targets) is critical for building

exible and scalable network-management systems. It also demonstrates that as the

networking technologies and protocols evolve rapidly with time, it is imperative to

design modular systems that can swiftly catch up with these changes. Finally, this

research also illustrates that it is crucial to select strategic locations (e.g., Internet exchange

points) for deployment to drive innovations in Internet-wide tra c monitoring

and control.