Joe Wenjie Jiang will present his research seminar/general exam on Monday May 12 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Jennifer Rexford (advisor), Mung Chiang (ELE), and Michael Freedman. Everyone is invited to attend his talk and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ------------------------------ Title : Cooperative Content Distribution and Traffic Engineering in a Provider Network Traditionally, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) make profit by providing Internet connectivity, while content providers (CPs) play the more lucrative role of delivering content to users. As network connectivity is increasingly a commodity, ISPs have a strong incentive to offer content to their subscribers by deploying their own Content Distribution Networks (CDNs). Running both a CDN and the underlying network presents new opportunities for coordination between server selection (to match servers with subscribers) and traffic engineering (to select efficient routes for the traffic). In this work, we utilize a mathematical framework to show that separating server selection and traffic engineering leads to a sub-optimal equilibrium, even when the CDN is given accurate and timely information about network conditions. Leveraging ideas from cooperative game theory, we propose that the system implements a Nash bargaining solution that significantly improves the fairness and efficiency of the joint system. This study is another step towards a systematic understanding of the interactions between those who generate and distribute contents and those who provide and operate networks. Reading List Textbook [1] L. Peterson and B. Davie, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, 3rd edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, May 2003. Research papers: [1] D. Clark, "The design philosophy of the DARPA Internet protocols," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 106-114, Aug. 1988. [2] T. Karagiannis, P. Rodriguez and K. Papagiannaki, "Should Internet Service Providers fear peer-assisted content distribution", IMC'05: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2005 on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 6-6, 2005. [3] A. Su, D. R. Choffnes, A. Kuzmanovic and F. Bustamante, "Drafting behind Akamai (Travelocity-based detouring)", SIGCOMM 2006, pp. 435-446, 2006. [4] M. Garetto, D. R. Figueiredo, R. Gaeta and M. Sereno, "A modeling framework to understand the tussle between ISPs and peer-to-peer file-sharing users", Performance Evaluation, vol. 64, no. 9-12, pp. 819-837, 2007. [5] V. Aggarwal, A. Feldmann and C. Scheideler, "Can ISPS and P2P users cooperate for improved performance?", ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 29-40, 2007. [6] H. Xie, A, Krishnamurthy, A. Silberschatz and Y. R. Yang, "P4P: Explicit Communications for Cooperative Control Between P2P and Network Providers", P4P Working Group position paper. [7] C. Huang, J. Li and K. W. Ross, "Can Internet video-on-demand be profitable?", SIGCOMM'07, pp. 133-144, 2007. [8] M. J. Freedman, C. Aperjis and R. Johari, "Prices are Right: Managing resources and incentives in peer-assisted content distribution", in submission. [9] T. Koponen, M. Chawla, B.-G. Chun, A. Ermolinskiy, K. H. Kim, S. Shenker, I. Stoica, "A Data-Oriented (and Beyond) Network Architecture", SIGCOMM'07, pp. 181-192, 2007. [10] M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M. Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream: High-bandwidth content distribution in a cooperative environment", ACM SOSP'03. [11] Antony I. T. Rowstron and Peter Druschel, "Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems", Middleware '01: Proceedings of the IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms Heidelberg, pp. 329-350, 2001. [12] M. Piatek, T. Isdal, T. Anderson, A. Krishnamurthy and A. Venkataramani, "Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent?", NSDI'07.