Frontiers in Networking

Communications Society

Speaker: Vincent Chan

This meeting is preceded by dinner with our guest speaker at Bertucci’s, 475 Winter St, Waltham, MA at 5:30 PM.

Future networks with orders of magnitude increase in data rates and large-granularity bursty traffic need an architecture with high efficiency that will also adapt dynamically to fluctuating offered loads and rapidly changing networks states. Moreover, applications and computing will impose new requirements on the network infrastructure, such as time deadlines. The current network management and control systems only adapt quasi-statically (from minutes to days) due to the smoothing effects of significant statistical multiplexing of traffic. Future networks will see an increase in demand mostly due to large-granularity sessions. These granular sessions present large dynamic range and bursty offered traffic to the network, resulting in unpredictable congestions and blocking.

We will explore efficient and agile network algorithms to adapt quickly to changing network conditions: a cognitive network management and control system resides in the network control plane as a collection of coordinated algorithms that sense and infer network states, decide and implement fast scheduling of flows, predict intention of users/applications and take appropriate actions, perform rapid load balancing, and handle resiliency via reconfiguration/restoration/reconstitution of failed network assets.

Speaker Bio: Vincent Chan, Joan and Irwin Jacobs Chair Professor, Claude E. Shannon Communication and Network Group, EECS, MIT

Vincent W. S. Chan, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor of EECS, MIT, received his BS(71), MS(71), EE(72), and Ph.D.(74) degrees in EE all from MIT. From 1974 to 1977, he was an assistant professor, EE, at Cornell University. He joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1977 and had been Division Head of the Communications and Information Technology Division until becoming the Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (1999–2007). He is currently a member of the Claude E. Shannon Communication and Network Group at the Research Laboratory of Electronics of MIT. In July 1983, he initiated the Laser Intersatellite Transmission Experiment Program and in 1997, the follow-on GeoLITE Program. In 1989, he formed the All-Optical-Network Consortium among MIT, AT&T and DEC. He also formed and served as PI the Next Generation Internet Consortium, ONRAMP among AT&T, Cabletron, MIT, Nortel and JDS, and a Satellite Networking Research Consortium formed between MIT, Motorola, Teledesic and Globalstar. He has served on many US/non-US government advisory boards/committees and the Board of Governors of the Communication Society including VP of Publications. He chaired the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Communications, Networks and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Advisory Committee and as Chair of the Subcommittees on IoT/Smart-City and Cyber Security, the NSA Director’s Advisory Panel and the very last Intelligence Science Board for the Director of National Intelligence. He also has been active with several start-ups and was a Board Member of a Fortune-500 network company and chaired its technical advisory board. He is a Member of the Corporation of Draper Laboratory and is a member of Eta-Kappa-Nu, Tau-Beta-Pi and Sigma-Xi, and the Fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America. He is currently the President of the IEEE Communication Society.

Throughout his career, Professor Chan has spent his research focus on communication and networks, particularly on free space and fiber optical communication and networks and satellite communications. His work has led the way to a successful laser communication demonstration in space and early deployment of WDM optical networks. His recent research emphasis is on algorithmically-optimized heterogeneous network architectures with stringent performance demands.