[Nets-seminars] MONDAY! First Nets Seminar of 2006

[Brad Karp]

An additional reminder about Monday's nets seminar, which is not in
the usual weekly slot. All are strongly encouraged to attend!

See you there,
-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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The next nets seminar will take place on January 23rd (Monday!) from 4
to 6 pm in room 6.12:

*Speaker*: 	Nina Taft, Intel Research Berkeley

The Evolution of Traffic Matrix Techniques and Applications: Past,
Present and Future

*Abstract*:

In this overview talk, we summarize how inference techniques to
estimate traffic matrices have evolved, what we have learned along the
way in terms of modeling of origin-destination (OD) flows, some
emerging applications of traffic matrices, and lastly, where research
in this area might lead to next. We can taxonomize this history into
generations and categorize solutions as either first, second or third
generation techniques.  Each generational step has been motivated by
trying to obtain additional data to incorporate in an inherently
ill-posed problem. Incorporating additional sources of data requires a
model to capture the information in a way that is useful to traffic
matrix estimation. This body of research has thus resulted in the
development of a number of interesting traffic models for
origin-destination flows. Modeling such flows presents additional
challenges beyond the traditional flow modeling, as it now becomes
important to incorporate both spatial and temporal correlations. In
addition to producing interesting OD flow models, traffic matrix
research has also lead to an increase of applications using traffic
matrices. These application areas, that include routing analysis and
network security, illustrate how new research problems can be enabled
by having a traffic matrix available.  In order to further enhance the
use of traffic matrices for other research activities, we show there
is a need to be able to generate traffic matrices
synthetically. Having such traffic descriptions would enable a much
richer ability to do benchmarking and performance evaluation of any
traffic engineering solution. We summarize the problems of synthetic
traffic matrix generation that turns out to be quite challenging.

*Biography*:

Nina Taft is currently a senior researcher at Intel Research
Berkeley. Her main research interests at Intel focus on traffic
monitoring for network security, end-host profiling, anomaly detection
as well as traffic modeling and network-wide traffic generation
tools. Prior to joining Intel, Nina worked at Sprint for 5 years in
the IP Group working on backbone Internet measurement. She conducted
research in various areas such as traffic matrix estimation, traffic
characterization, routing protocols and IP-over-WDM network design
problems. Prior to Sprint, Nina worked at SRI International for four
years. There her work focused on congestion control and QoS routing in
ATM networks. She received her PhD degree from the University of
Berkeley in 1994 on traffic characterization. Nina is currently
serving as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Networking
(ToN) journal and is a member of the ACM Internet Measurement
Conference (IMC) steering committee.