Statement of Research for Nandita Dukkipati

The Internet has been a remarkable success, yet in many ways it is woefully inadequate in meeting the needs of applications and users. Its performance is unpredictable, it is frequently unavailable when we need it, and it does not easily support new technologies such as wireless or evolve with changing needs of users and applications. There are applications we would not think of running on it, such as a remote health monitoring and diagnostic service which requires location awareness, ubiquitous and seamless connectivity, and high availability while being able to support a large number of devices. The focus of my research is to make networks more adaptable, evolvable, self-managed, and cost-efficient, as well as improve their performance so as to make these applications feasible. While my primary goal is to innovate and build practical solutions, I also enjoy the approach of using theoretical tools wherever applicable. My current work is on designing a novel congestion control algorithm for the Internet that is appreciably better than the widely used TCP. I describe this work below followed by my ideas for future research. A lot of my work has immensely benefited through collaboration with my colleagues.