News

Colloquia

Identity-Based Routing

Matthew Caesar
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department
University of California, Berkeley

Friday, March 23, 2007

Routing today scales by assigning addresses that depend on the host's topological location in the network. Topology-based addressing improves scalability, since adjacent addresses may be aggregated into blocks and advertised as a single unit. However, if hosts move, or the network topology changes, these addresses must change. This poses two problems. First, in ad-hoc networks and sensornets, the topology is so fluid that topology-based addressing doesn't work. There has been a decades-long search for scalable routing algorithms for these networks with no solution in sight. Second, the use of topology-based addressing in the Internet complicates mobility, access control, and multihoming.
Identity-based addressing, where addresses refer only to the identity of the host but not its location, would solve these problems, but would pose severe challenges for scalability. This talk will present the first scalable routing algorithm for identity-based addresses. Implementation results from a sensornet deployment and simulations demonstrate the protocol outperforms several traditional wireless routing algorithms. I will also describe extensions to scale the protocol to Internet-size topologies and support several common ISP-level routing policies.

Bio Matthew Caesar is a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley, and he expects to graduate with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2007. He previously worked in research groups at AT&T Labs and Microsoft Research. He was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His research interests involve simplifying the management of distributed systems and networks through principles of self-organization and self-diagnosis, with an emphasis on sensornet/wireless networks, overlay networks, and the Internet.

Administrative support: Jacky Carley (x8291)