Managing today’s complex networks while still ensuring that certain high level goals are met is proving to be a complicated process. There is a growing need to separate the high level goals/policies from the low level mechanisms that implement the various services. In this talk, I will present our ongoing work in developing a declarative framework for enforcing high level policies in networks. One of the key goals of our framework is to enable applications to expose their semantics, thereby allowing the underlying network to exploit the semantics and provide better-than-best-effort service where possible. We will then see how our framework can be used in adaptive applications where both the application and the network can adapt simultaneously in response to changing network conditions.

The presentation will be streamed live via ustream.tv.

“In this thesis, we propose to build a declarative framework that can reason over the requirements of applications, the current network context, operator policies, and appropriately configure the network to provide better network support for applications. … In particular, the contributions of this thesis are (i) Developing a framework for using context and policies in declarative networked systems (ii) Runtime adaptation of network configuration based on application requirements and node/operator policy (iii) Formalize cross layer interactions as opposed to ad hoc optimizations (iv) Simulation and test bed implementations to validate and evaluate proposed approach.”