Sharon Goldberg: "The Diffusion of Networking Technologies"

Date: 

Monday, February 25, 2013, 12:15pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Maxwell Dworkin G125

CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, February 25, 2013
Time: 12:15pm – 1:15pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin G125

Speaker: Sharon Goldberg, Boston University

Title: The Diffusion of Networking Technologies

Abstract: Two decades of research, engineering, and standardization have resulted in a number of new networking protocols (e.g. IPv6, secure BGP, DNSSEC, etc) that still have not seen widespread adoption on the Internet. Adoption is complicated by the fact that the Internet consists of thousands of interconnected, independent networks that make their own local decisions about whether (or not) to upgrade to a new protocol. In this talk, I consider how the local incentives of these independent networks can be harnessed to drive a cascade that leads to global adoption of a new networking protocol. I will (a) discuss some of the practical issues related to creating incentives for adopting networking protocols like IPv6 and secure BGP, and (b) present a new approximation algorithm, for choosing the smallest set of early adopter networks that can trigger a cascade of adoption.

Based on a tutorial at EC’12, and joint work with Zhenming Liu.

Bio:Sharon Goldberg is an assistant professor of computer science at Boston University. She obtained her PhD from Princeton University in July 2009, and her BASc from the University of Toronto in June 2003. Her research uses tools from theory (cryptography, game theory,
algorithms) and networking (measurement, modeling, and simulation) to solve problems in network security.