Projects on-sale in SAHARA
Graduate or Senior Undergraduate Projects:
OASIS programmable networking testbed/cluster management and control tools
(George)
Tomography-based Overlay Network Monitoring System: Implementation and Deployment
(Yan)
Policy Check Engine for Secure Wireless Network Access
(Takashi and Ana)
Title:
OASIS programmable networking testbed/cluster management and control tools
Background:
The OASIS project is focused on building network services from the network
layer up. Informed by the introduction of a vast array of special-purpose
processing points within the network (such as SAN storage directors,
HTTP load balancers, firewalls, traffic shapers, etc), we are designing
Programmable Network Elements based on
a Classify, Infer,
and Act architecture. By utilizing arbitrary combinations of
high speed--yet customizable--packet filters, we will be able to invoke
per-stream and per-packet processing at various points in the network.
This capability will be the basis of larger, distributed services and
applications such as storage management, distributed authentication, and
multimedia applications.
Brief Description:
To evaluate the PNE design, as well as deployed applications, we have
built a cluster/testbed in 440 Soda. This testbed consists of 20
rack-mounted Pentium-class computers, several Alteon 180 switches, and
two Nortel Passport Carrier-class routers. This design will allow
for quickly reconfigurable, dynamic topologies. The problem is that
going from one configuration to another is a very tedious and error-prone
activity, since we must update the routers, routing tables in each of
the linux boxes, and VLAN tags in the switches. Currently there is no
clean way to manage the testbed, control it, and diagnose and identify
problems.
The purpose of this undergraduate research project would be to design
a system to control and manage the testbed. Ideally, a user would
specify a topology, and the system would map that into a set of
updates for each of the devices. Using Tcl and SNMP, these updates
could be propogated to the various devices. Furthermore, SNMP could
be used to collect information and statistics from the routers and
servers to identify errors. Maybe you might even design a webpage
interface? Feel free to go nuts!
Required Qualifications: Basic
UNIX experience. Additionally, must either know (or be willing to learn
on your own) Tcl/Tk (or Java, depending on what you want to use), SNMP,
and basic unix networking. Could be a good way to learn network
management/networking.
Contact:
George Porter
(gporter at cs.berkeley.edu)
Title:
Tomography-based Overlay Network Monitoring System: Implementation and Deployment
(valid through Dec. 2003)
Background: This project aims to
understand the behavior of Internet,
and designs a scalable Internet overlay monitoring system to provide
adaptation to Internet applications and services.
Brief Description:
Overlay network monitoring enables distributed Internet applications to detect
and recover from path outages and periods of degraded performance within
several seconds.
We will design and implement a scalable overlay network monitoring system, which
given n end hosts and n^2 paths among them, we only selectively monitor k linearly
independent paths so that the loss rates/latency of all other paths can be inferred.
We will deploy it on global network testbed, PlanetLab
to provide it as a continuous service to the research community.
The students will get hand-on experience of network measurement and analysis,
and understand the real behaviors of various networks (access network, core network,
etc.).
Besides, you will get acquainted with many researchers from various institutes and research labs
who will use this service. You may be famous :)
Required Qualifications: Java/C programming, Basic knowledge of network protocols.
Contact:
Yan Chen
(yanchen AT cs.berkeley.edu)
Title:
Policy Check Engine for Secure Wireless Network Access
Background:
Roaming is a major issue for wireless networking industry because of the growing number
of wireless ISPs. We envision that they will federate with each other, and mobile clients
will be able to seamlessly roam over the federated networks without interrupted.
Seamless roaming, however, is not always good. For example, users might seamlessly
sign-on to a rogue access point, which cheats the victims out of credit card number.
Even seamless sign-on to a legitimate provider can be undesirable if it charges by the hour
even while users are not using the network. They don't like to pay because their PCs stayed
up in their bags.
Brief Description:
In the light of this problem, we are planning to build a policy check engine, which
interacts with a user agent and makes a decision about whether the requested authentication
information can be sent out from the client. This decision is made according to a user-defined
policy written in an XML-based access control language
(XACML). In the policy, users can
specify who is authorized to access which authentication information under which conditions.
We will use an XACML open source to implement the policy check engine. The developed policy
check engine will be tested on our testbed, which is currently under development to
emulate federated wireless networks.
Required Qualifications: Experienced in XML and Java.
Contact:Takashi Suzuki
(tsuzuki@eecs.berkeley.edu)
and
Ana Sanz Merino
(asanz@eecs.berkeley.edu)