Prof. Reza Rejaie Awarded Research Grant from Cisco Systems
The Cisco Systems University Research Program has awarded an unrestricted gift in the amount of $78,000 to Prof. Reza Rejaie. This gift will support Prof. Rejaie's research on "Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Peer-to-Peer Networks", as part of his IONP2P project.
In recent years, the pervasive deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications (such as Gnutella and BitTorrent) has had a profound effect on the Internet that is even more tangible than the impact of the Web. The goal of Rejaie's work is the development of measurement techniques for collecting unbiased samples from popular P2P applications, to provide a better understanding of their behavior and impact. Once the sampling techniques have been developed and verified, the next phase of the project is to carefully study peer behavior and to develop models of how users arrive and depart. These models are essential for properly understanding and simulating P2P systems to improve their performance.
Part of the Cisco grant will be used to support senior CIS Ph.D. student Daniel Stutzbach. A key member of the ION P2P team, Stutzbach has developed various measurement tools, conducted extensive measurement on several P2P systems, and performed detailed analysis on the vast amount of collected data.
Recently, two papers by Stutzbach and Rejaie were accepted for publication at the prestigious Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), sponsored by SIGCOMM and Usenix: "On Unbiased Sampling for Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks" by Daniel Stutzbach, Reza Rejaie, Nick Duffield, Subhabrata Sen, and Walter Willinger and "Understanding Churn in Peer-to-Peer Networks" by Daniel Stutzbach and Reza Rejaie.
Prof. Rejaie joined the Department of Computer and Information Science in September 2002 as an Assistant Professor. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1996 and 1999 respectively. Prof. Rejaie received a NSF CAREER Award for his work on P2P streaming in 2005. He leads the Mirage Research Group in the CIS department.
See ~reza for more information about Dr. Rejaie's research and teaching.