Illinois computer science is pleased to welcome professor Matthew Caesar to the faculty. Caesar brings his innovative approach to network and distributed system management to the department's Networking and Distributed Systems group.
Caesar's research focuses on simplifying the management of distributed systems and networks through principles of self-organization and self-diagnosis, with an emphasis on wide-area networks and networked systems.
His work in this area is becoming increasingly important as networks become ever more complex and distributed systems are being deployed to handle new computing challenges. The demands on performance and functionality in an architecture that is increasingly complex have led many to call for a redesign of the Internet, as in the NewArch project, says Caesar.
A key challenge faced in designing a new Internet lies in management and configuration. These issues were overlooked when designing early data networks and the Internet has been paying a massive price ever since, says Caesar.
Currently, most, if not all, networked systems rely on human intervention to configure and manage their services. Such reliance not only increases costs and overhead for ISPs and others, but also drastically increases the potential for misconfiguration and increases the reaction time needed to address issues.
"What is lacking today is a principled look at how to make systems manage themselves. We need a fresh approach to designing networks and protocols with self-management in mind," says Caesar. "Toward this goal my research focuses on protocols and systems that bootstrap, configure, and troubleshoot problems with only minimal manual intervention. In particular, these systems aim to self-configure in the presence of arbitrary topologies and failure modes, self-diagnose routing problems, and self-tune operation based on diagnoses."
Caesar is currently working on projects in the areas of network measurement and debugging, network availability and resilience, and network management and configuration.