Computer Science Professor Helps Advance UO Network Research

Daniel Zappala's zest for developing practical large-scale network
applications fuels the growth
of CIS's Network Research Group

When Daniel Zappala came to the University of Oregon Computer and Information Science Department in 1997, he was primarily attracted by two things: the university’s strong support for networking, and the opportunity to establish a cutting-edge network research program.

Assistant CIS Professor and Network Research Group co-founder Daniel Zappala.

Zappala had already developed a taste for network research, having worked with leading networking researchers Deborah Estrin, Lixia Zhang, and Scott Shenker, as well as Internet pioneers John Postel and Bob Braden, while earning his Ph.D. in computer science at USC. At that time, the USC team, in conjunction with researchers at Xerox PARC, was developing the Resource ReSerVation protocol (RSVP), which provides quality of service guarantees to applications by reserving resources along network paths.

Although Zappala hasn’t lost interest in RSVP, since arriving at the UO he has turned his attention to other portions of the Internet architecture, including multicast routing, peer-to-peer networks, and mobile ad hoc networks.

In the past six years, nurtured by Zappala and several other CIS faculty members, the fledgling Network Research Group has grown to a total of six faculty and five Ph.D. students (with more being recruited this spring), and has graduated a dozen students with M.S. degrees. The biggest boost came last fall, when assistant professors Reza Rejaie and Jun Li joined the team, adding their expertise in multimedia distribution and network security to the research effort.

Zappala is excited about the growth of the program. Since the arrival of the two new faculty members, he notes that there has been a "burst of activity—new projects being started, grants and papers written, etc." "We now have a good ‘critical mass’ in (networking), so I expect a lot of continuing activity," he says.

Other distinguished core faculty members include Virginia Lo, Art Farley, and Andrzej Proskurowski, who are currently working with Zappala on an interdisciplinary project investigating new group communication architectures. The project, which incorporates aspects of graph theory and parallel computing into Internet group communication, is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Last fall, Zappala and grad student Chris Gauthier-Dickey traveled to Taiwan to present papers on the group’s findings to the Global Internet Symposium. This work has led to a joint project, funded by Cisco, between Zappala and Kevin Almeroth at UC Santa Barbara to build new multicast dissemination protocols.

Although the language of multicast protocols ("SSM proxies," "multiple core trees," "Cyclic block allocation") is esoteric and the technology seems arcane, its applications can be practical and universal, and Zappala foresees a time when multicast communication will be "used daily by everyday people."

Multicast technology is already used for transmitting stock market updates and updating website mirrors, and when it’s more widely available it could be used routinely in all types of group communication — including education, games, conferences, and Internet TV. The research Zappala and his colleagues are doing in ad hoc wireless networks also has great practical potential. Ad hoc routing protocols, which enable mobile users to exchange data directly among themselves without going through a base station, are especially useful in situations (such as a conference, rescue site, or military campaign) that require networks to be set up on the fly, without first installing the usual network infrastructure.

To further its work, the Network Research Group maintains a research lab for development, simulation, and prototyping of network protocols for the Internet. The lab’s custom-built PCs run the Linux operating system, which is both open source and free. This allows the group to modify the operating system code as needed and easily share code with the research community.

If you want to keep abreast of what Zappala and his group are up to, visit the Network Research Group website at http://www.nrg.cs.uoregon.edu/