2025 Theses Doctoral

Optimizing Interdomain Routing for Today's and Tomorrow's Services

Koch, Thomas

Large cloud and content (service) providers serve applications that are responsible for the vast majority of Internet traffic today. However, service providers have to contend with decades-old Internet protocols to do so and, in particular, to route latency sensitive user traffic over the public Internet to service provider networks. This reliance creates urgent problems as businesses/people/governments increasingly rely on the Internet for critical activities, and as new applications such as VR introduce increasingly strict network performance requirements.

This dissertation explores the extent to which current ways service providers use the Internet's old protocols are sufficient to meet demands of today's and tomorrows applications. It then proposes using these old Internet protocols in new ways to reliably route user traffic over an unreliable public Internet by solving challenging optimization problems using new Internet measurement and modeling techniques. The systems described in this dissertation can help service providers work with existing infrastructure to deliver the reliable, performant service our increasingly connected society needs.