OR 590 COLLOQIUM

4:15-5:30 PM, April 6, 2004

Room 105 Rackley Building

Pricing residential broadband access for the emerging Internet

Professor George Kesidis

EE and CSE Depts

Penn. State Univ.,

Abstract: Residential penetration of broadband Internet access, both DSL and cable, is growing very rapidly. Furthermore, technology may soon expand available access bandwidth from about a maximum of 10Mbps today to 100Mpbs in the near future. Demand for broadband access is fueled by the desire for “value-added” services (such as interactive gaming, emerging peer-to-peer applications, IP telephony, etc.) and by the affordable additional cost of subscription over dial-up access. We will discuss the commercial and cyber security concerns of such a dramatic increase in residential broadband access (RBA). A “first hop diffserv” architecture is proposed so that the infrastructure providers of RBA can recover costs from the value-added services they enable, and also address security concerns, by offering a premium service that is more reliable. Specifically, we focus on the packet memories feeding the links connecting the first-PoP layer-3 routers of the RBA provider to the Internet. A differential enqueue policy is devised and the dynamics of user access are studied when there is congestion (excess demand) in the memory.

Biography: George Kesidis received his M.S. and Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley in 1990 and 1992 respectively.  He was a professor in the E&CE Dept of the University of Waterloo, Canada, from 1992 to 2000. Since April 2000, he has been an associate professor in both the EE and CS&E Depts of the Pennsylvania State University.  In 1999, he took a sabbatical with Nortel Networks, Ottawa, to work, in particular, on low-complexity traffic measurement and estimation and on bandwidth scheduling for MPLS.  In 2001, he was part time member of technical staff at Mahi Networks working on embedding algorithms in the data plane of their multi-protocol router.   

In addition to a book on ATM networking, Prof. Kesidis has authored papers on the following topics related  to communication networks: effective bandwidths and traffic modeling, quick simulation, traffic multiplexing (scheduling) algorithms, traffic shaping, traffic measurement and estimation, network resources provisioning for QoS, TCP-friendly active queue management (AQM), network pricing and billing, and modeling and traceback of malicious behavior (network security).  

His current research also includes the following problems in wireless ad hoc networking: network self-organization, energy efficient routing, energy efficient medium access control and scheduling, mobility management for sensor networks, and intrusion detection. Currently, he is on the technical program committees of 2004 IEEE INFOCOM (Hong Kong) and 2004 IEEE ICC (Paris) and he will be TPC co-chair of INFOOCM 2007. George Kesidis is a senior member of the IEEE.