Fault Tolerant Real-Time Networks

Abstract : Our main objective in this MURI project has been to investigate foundational and experimental techniques tor enabling real-time, fault-tolerant network protocols. Our overall research goal has been to study networking architectures, services, and algorithms which require innovative quality-of-service and fault-tolerance mechanisms. We have focused on multimedia delivery in traditional client-server architectures, both in the case of the Internet and wireless networks, as well as on peer-to-peer content delivery and on mobile ad-hoc networks. The unique composition of the team has brought new synergies to the problem domain which permits the complete illumination of each newly proposed protocol from all angles, from mathematical modeling and analysis to experimental evaluation, from real-time and QoS aspects to fault-tolerance and reliability aspects. Our approach is to improve newly designed protocols through feedback from timing and fault analysis, and to develop new analysis techniques driven by new protocol designs.