Talk by Pamela Zave: Compositional Network Mobility

ABSTRACT:

To meet the needs of society, the future Internet must support a much wider variety of applications, stakeholders, resources, endpoint devices, communication functions, service guarantees, and resource policies than the Internet does today.  Evolution will require a tremendous amount of new, high-quality network software.  We believe that the importance of network software justifies considerable effort to understand this software domain, and to develop architectural principles for network software.  This talk reports on our early efforts toward this goal.

Network mobility is a central and desirable software function that provides uninterrupted communication service to mobile machines. We define mobility and formally specify its effect on network services. Starting with a basic architecture for the software of a network layer, we describe two fundamentally distinct mechanisms for implementing mobility.  All known implementations of mobility use one of these generic mechanisms, despite many design variations within the broad description. By delineating the exact effect of each implementation on layer software, we show that different mobility implementations in the same and adjacent layers compose freely, without alteration or interference.

This is joint work with Jennifer Rexford at Princeton University.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:

 Pamela Zave received an A.B. in English from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin--Madison. She has held positions at the University of Maryland and Bell Labs, and is now with AT&T Laboratories--Research.

Dr. Zave is interested in all aspects of formal methods for software engineering as applied to networking. For the past twelve years she has led a group of researchers building and analyzing IP-based voice and multimedia services using the Distributed Feature Composition architecture, invented by her and Michael A. Jackson.  This group has developed two successful large-scale telecommunication systems.

Dr. Zave is an ACM Fellow and an AT&T Fellow. She has won three Ten-Year Most Influential Paper awards, four Best Paper awards, the AT&T Strategic Patent Award, and the AT&T Science and Technology Medal. She holds 18 patents in the telecommunications area, and is currently chair of IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology.