Topics in Networking Research

What are the big movements in networking that researchers should heed? A standout is the global spread of communities of interest (the networking analogue of the flat world) and their need for "dynamic virtual networks" that support rich applications requiring resources from several domains. The imperative for internetworking, i.e., the enablement of coordinated sharing of resources across multiple domains, is certain. This challenge has many facets, ranging from the organizational, e.g., different, possibly competing, owners to the technical, e.g., different technologies. Yet another key characteristic of the emerging networking environment is that the service provider is required to handle ever-increasing uncertainty in demand, both in volume and time. On the other hand there are new instruments available to handle the challenge. Thus, inter-networking and uncertainty management are important challenges of emerging networking that deserve attention from the research community. We describe research that touch on both topics. First, we consider a model of data-optical inter-networking, where routes connecting end-points in data domains are a concatenation of segments in the data and optical domains... In turning to undertainty management we begin by presenting a framework for stochastic traffic management.