The growing reliance on the Internet for accessing information and conducting commerce has paralleled an explosive growth in size and complexity of the underlying communication infrasturcture. As the national and economic infrastructures have become increasingly dependent on the global Internet infrasturcture, the end-to-end availability and reliability of data networks promises to have significant ramifications for an ever-expanding range of applications. For example, transient disruption in backbone networks that previously impacted a handful of scientists, may now cause enormous financial loss and disrupt hundreds of thousands of end users. The Lighthouse Project is aimed at developing new protocols and architectures for ensuring availability of network infrastructure in the presence of security attacks, hardware and software failures, and operational faults. Various aspects of this work, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and Merit Network, include: experimental study of convergence and stability properties of networks; passive and active instrumentation tools for detection and removal of network-based intrusions such as denial-of-service attacks; and adaptive and self-healing infrastructure protocols with fast convergence properties.

This project is sponsored by: