Computer science’s Ng and Cox receive a National Science Foundation grant

Computer science’s Ng and Cox receive a National Science Foundation grant

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Eugene Ng dreams of giving the Internet a revolutionary new architecture, a vision he likens to a conductor orchestrating the network’s operation.

EUGENE NG

ALAN COX

”Controlling and managing a network is very tricky,” said Ng, assistant professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering. “Multiple software components are responsible for network operation. They interact, sometimes chaotically, resulting in network outages and poor service. We propose a new paradigm for network control and management that gives network operators a new unifying platform on which to innovate.”

With the aid of a three-year, $520,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ng and Alan Cox, associate professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering, are researching ways to realize a new network operating platform that would oversee all underlying network behavior. ”This is not an incremental fix. Our approach is not traditional and is very challenging,” Ng said.

Their proposed architecture, Maestro, uses application programs running on an operating platform to control and manage network routers. The operating platform orchestrates the actions of the applications and protects the network from application misbehavior, acting as a guardian of the network.

Among the immediate benefits of the Maestro architecture is improved Internet dependability — it makes networks less prone to problems resulting from unpredictable interactions among control and management software components. The operating platform provides an ideal environment for introducing new network innovations.

Ng compares Maestro to the groundbreaking step taken when computer operating systems were initially conceived and designed to regulate the interactions among many programs running on the same computer.

Ng and Cox have built a system prototype, which they expect to try out in a network test bed.  ”Gradually, we will push this system out into the real world,” Ng said.

The Maestro project is supported by NSF’s FIND (Future Internet Network Design) program, dedicated, as stated on its Web site, to ”reconceiving tomorrow’s global network today, if we could design it from scratch.”

”What we’re interested in is clean-slate thinking, a new vision of the future. I foresee a time when you can go to a Wal-Mart store and buy software designed for the Maestro operating platform to add new functions to your home network,” Ng said.