My interest is in large-scale network optimization and traffic engineering. Fundamentally, network engineers face two problems - how to build a network and how to operate it. Today’s Internet is characterized by its massive scale, connectionless principle and chaotic traffic statistics. Optical networking brings in huge bandwidth potential and additional flexibility in operation, yet, adds more variables to the engineers’ puzzle. The constant motivation of my research is to truly understand the Internet “beast” and unleash the power of optical technologies.

During my Ph.D. study at the Networks Lab., UC Davis, luckily, I was able to tackle several fascinating problems in both network optimization and traffic engineering.

Complex optimization problems are common in optical network design. I have solved several such problems in both metropolitan area and backbone networks. In each case, the complexity of the problem is beyond any existing computational power. Engineering tractable heuristics are developed for practical solutions.

Traffic engineering is often considered the management of traffic at coarse bandwidth and time scale. Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) has the potential to become the signaling protocol for traffic engineering at various traffic-granularity levels including the wavelength level. I led the development of a GMPLS simulation tool. Using our tool, we studied the performance of several GMPLS fault-management schemes. Our results provide a comprehensive comparison of these schemes and may help the ongoing standardization works in IETF.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein.