Challenges and Opportunities for Tomorrow's Networks

The Internet is the underlying fabric for nearly all of our day-to-day communication; it is an undeniable success. More than a billion people around the world now have Internet access, and that number is projected to at least double in the next 10 years. The Internet is seeing increasing penetration in various resource-challenged environments, both in this country and abroad. These new frontiers for networking offer exciting opportunities, but they also pose serious challenges. Internet attacks are proliferating. Networks are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to troubleshoot. More than 20 countries around the world censor at least some Internet content. Our personal and private data is falling into the hands of a few large content providers. The performance of networks in homes, and how humans interact with them, are both poorly understood. These coming challenges will require us to think differently about networking: a discipline that has focused almost exclusively on performance must begin thinking more about people.

In this talk, I will take a retrospective view of some important networking innovations over the past 10 years, surveying some solutions we and others have developed to improve the Internet's security, manageability and availability. I will then take a look forward at new challenges, and argue that to solve the most pressing problems for networking today, we must draw on techniques from a broad range of areas, including policy, economics, programming languages and human-computer interaction.

Nick Feamster is an assistant professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In December 2008, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His honors also include a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, Technology Review's TR35 award, the IBM Faculty Fellowship, and award papers at SIGCOMM 2006, the NSDI 2005 conference, Usenix Security 2002 and Usenix Security 2001.