Research
My interests lie in the area of networks, systems and distributed computing.
In particular I am interested in the benefits achievable by data center transport protocols when we add the features of software defined networking to them. I am doing work in this area under the tutelage of my advisor Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi and some other colleagues. I have been extremely privileged to also receive guidance from Dr. Fahad Rafique Dogar from Tufts University.
Recently there has been much interest in the network research community in the improvement of transport layer protocols for the specific case of data center networks. DCTCP was the first among quite a few proposals for changes to TCP within the DCN. Other works in this area include: D^3, PDQ, D2TCP, L2DCT, pFabric, and some more. Each of them have their own pros and cons, however we aim to devise a mechanism which can attain all the benefits achieved by its predecessors, but at the same time do all this without requiring changes to the network fabric (i.e. the switches in particular).
It would also be interesting if we could measure how legacy protocols such as TCP fare when they coexist with newer protocols such as DCTCP, given that they have slightly different mechanisms for increase and decrease of sending rates. A network simulator such as NS-2 could be used to simulate such an experiment, to test the coexistence of protocols such as TCP and DCTCP. Our work related to this was published in ICC 2014 (Coexistence of Transports in the DCN)