Network systems and network security

Introduction

The Internet has become crucial for almost all parts of our society. Whether it is (remote) work, public services, shopping or socialising, it has become hard to imagine a world without the Internet. Conversely, this means that the dependability, resilience and security of the Internet are now of paramount importance. A service disruption or intentional attack on Internet services can have a severe impact on our society. In this track, we aim at studying the Internet, for example by measuring traffic flow over the Internet to gain a deeper understanding on the performance bottlenecks, anomalies, or attacks. While this was easy in the early days of the Internet where there were very few connected nodes running simple applications, the same is hard to claim nowadays. Now, the Internet consists of tens of thousands of autonomous systems at the network core and billions of connected devices at the network edge. This quickly renders studies of Internet phenomena into a complex analytical task. There is a need for novel methods to conduct global-scale network measurements and to understand this complex ecosystem. With the developed tools, one can investigate deployment of new technologies, the security, resilience as well as societal impact of the Internet.

Given that the primary mode of access to the Internet has become wireless, it is important to understand and improve the performance of wireless and mobile communication infrastructures. With the increasing number of connected wireless devices and high volume of traffic generated by these devices, it becomes a challenge for the network providers to use the limited radio spectrum efficiently. The network providers have to allocate their resources (e.g., spectrum, antenna) and deploy their network infrastructure to meet an estimated traffic load and requirements of the applications consumed by their users. Different than the past, now wireless networks have to serve a variety of applications in addition to mobile broadband. For example, cooperative autonomous cars necessitate a high degree of message delivery reliability for safety services while some smart industry applications require an ultra-reliable low latency communication. In this track, we are interested in applying the state-of-the-art communication paradigms to meet the performance requirements (e.g., throughput, reliability, energy efficiency) of such challenging scenarios. The Internet is like a living organism: it is in constant change with new technologies being deployed at the network core and at the edge. It is crucial to understand the implications of these new technologies such as network function virtualisation or software-defined networking on the performance of communication networks.

In a nutshell, a key research challenge that students of this track will be confronted with is the question of how to improve the resilience, security, and efficiency of communication networks which include the Internet and wireless networks (WiFi, 4/5G) to serve a diverse set of use cases ranging from vehicular scenarios to smart industry applications. Analytical modelling, measurements, data analysis, protocol design, and simulations help to develop further insights into these described questions and potential solutions.

Information

For specific information on the content of this track, you may contact the track chair: Suzan Bayhan.