Vinay Aggarwal

Current Address:
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories,
Technische Universitaet Berlin,
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7,
10587 Berlin, Germany

Former Address:
Technische Universitaet München
Institut für Informatik (I8)
Boltzmannstr. 3
85748 Garching bei München
Germany

About me

Hello, thank you for taking the time and interest to visit my web page. On this page, you will find some information about me and my research interests.
I was born in India, and did my schooling and bachelors study in Computer Science there. I received a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree from Gujarat University in 2001, and was awarded a Gold Medal for ranking 1st in my college. Thereafter, I moved to the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik (MPI), Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saabruecken, Germany, for doing a Masters in Computer Science. During my Masters study, I was awarded a Fellowship by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
I then joined the Lehrstuhl (Chair) of Prof. Anja Feldmann at TU Munich in 2003, to pursue a PhD in Computer Networks and Internet technologies. In 2006, I moved with her group to TU Berlin, where I am currently employed at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, researching innovation solutions that will enable ISP performance improvements, cost savings and end-user experience.
I have served as the principal researcher for the EU Complex Systems Research Project DELIS at TU Munich and TU Berlin, and have authored research proposals as well as a number of papers at journals and conferences. Below, you can find links to some of my recent publications.
I expect to receive a doctorate (PhD) in early 2008.

Project Description

 Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems account for more than half of Internet traffic today, and an increasing number of user applications are relying on P2P methodology. P2P systems build overlays at the application layer. independently of Internet routing and ISP topologies. This leads to measurement traffic overhead and routing inefficiencies for P2P users, as well as difficulties in managing network traffic for ISPs.

We propose a simple, general solution based on active ISP-P2P collaboration, where an ISP hosts a server, called the oracle that helps P2P users choose optimal neighbours. A P2P user sends the list of potential peers to the oracle, which ranks this list based on a number of factors that each ISP can decide individually. For instance, the ISP can prefer peers within its network, to prevent traffic from leaving its network. Further, it can pick higher bandwidth links, or peers that are geographically closer, to take into consideration its routing policy both within its network as well as to other ISPs. This not only reduces costs and eases traffic engineering for ISPs, but also provides improved performance for P2P users in the sense of higher bandwidth and lesser download times.

We have analyzed this scheme on generic as well as specific P2P systems, with both application and network layer simulation frameworks. We have also conducted Testbed experiments and Planetlab deployments. Our results show that overlay graphs, on consulting the oracle, maintain their nice graph structural properties, while the number of intra-AS peerings increase considerably. Not only does P2P scalability improve, we also show that there is no adverse effect on the content search phase of P2P networks. The P2P users are still able to locate all available content, and the download times decrease considerably. The ISPs are able to save costs by keeping large amount of traffic within their network, perform better Traffic Engineering, and provide better service to all customers. We have demonstrated that the scheme maintains its benefits across various models of P2P user behaviour (churn, free-riding, query patterns), as well as ISP and P2P topologies.

We have successfully convinced a number of ISPs about the benefits of our approach, and are currently working on implementing the system for Deutsche Telekom. Besides, we are extending the concept to build a global coordinate system, and to control pollution and malicious content in P2P systems. We have also performed P2P measurements and visualization analysis of overlay-underlay correlations.

Publications
Vinay Aggarwal, 30 March 2008