Chang Kim will present his preFPO on Monday November 10 at 9AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Jennifer Rexford, advisor; Michael Freedman and Albert Greenberg (MSR), readers; Vivek Pai and Margaret Martonosi, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The abstract follows below. --------------------------------- Scalable and Efficient Self-Configuring Networks Abstract: Maintaining scalability and efficiency in conventional networks often requires huge amount of administrative effort to configure network devices and protocols. Large configuration overhead increases operational expenditures and leads to frequent failures due to configuration mistakes. On the other hand, self-configuring networks, such as Ethernet, work only on a small scale, because increasing the size of the network rapidly degrades its performance (e.g., skews link utilization, stretches traffic-forwarding paths, lowers availability, delays failover, etc.). This thesis proposes a simple and generic set of architectural primitives that enable self-configuring in a large network without sacrificing performance. Those primitives are flat addressing, traffic indirection, and caching of routing state. By building upon these primitives, the thesis proposes and evaluates three specific architectural solutions designed respectively for enterprises, data centers, and providers: i) a scalable Ethernet architecture for large enterprises (SEATTLE), ii) a next-generation data-center network architecture (Monsoon), and iii) a scalable VPN routing architecture for large tier-1 providers (Relaying). The resulting architectures collectively demonstrate the efficacy of the primitives in resolving the tussle among scalability, efficiency, and lower management complexity.