Internet Research and Engineering
I am trying to make the Internet better -- through research and engineering work. I am currently co-chairing two research groups at the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), a sister organization of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
IRTF Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG)
Information-Centric Networking is the general term for a networking approach that is based on accessing named data (instead of sending packets to addressable hosts) in the network. ICNRG is an international forum for promoting experimental research and the development of protocol specifications for ICN.
IRTF Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group (DINRG)
The internet was designed as a distributed, decentralized system. For example, intra- and inter-domain routing, DNS, and so on were designed to operate in a distributed manner. However, over time the dominant deployment model for applications and some infrastructure services evolved to become more centralized and hierarchical. Some of the increase in centralization is due to business models that rely on centralized accounting and administration.
The Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group (DINRG) investigates open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery. The focus of DINRG is on infrastructure services that can benefit from decentralization or that are difficult to realize in local, potentially connectivity-constrained networks. The objective of DINRG is to 1) investigate (understand, document, survey) use cases and their specific requirements with respect to implementing them in a distributed manner; 2) to discuss and assess solutions for specific use cases with a focus on Internet level deployment issues such as scalability, performance, and security; 3) to develop and document technical solutions and best practices; 4) to develop tools and metrics to identify scaling issues and to determine whether components are missing; and 5) to identify future work items for the IETF. Other topics of interest are the investigation of economic drivers and incentives and the development and operation of experimental platforms.