Towards a Networking “Characteristica Universalis''

Speaker : Zied Ben Houid
Nokia Bell Labs
Date: 25/01/2017
Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: LINCS Meeting Room 40

Abstract

Most unwritten languages today have no known grammar, and are rather governed by “unspoken rules”. Similarly, we think that the young discipline of networking is still a practice that lacks a deep understanding of the rules that govern it. This situation results in a loss of time and efforts. First, since the rules are unspoken, they are not systematically reused. Second, since there is no grammar, it is impossible to assert if a sentence is correct. Comparing two networking approaches or solutions is sometimes a synonym of endless religious debates. Drawing the proper conclusion from this claim, we advocate that networking research should spend more efforts on better understanding its rules as a first step to automatically reuse them. To illustrate our claim, we focus in this work on one broad family of networking connectivity problems. We show how different instances of this problem, which were solved in parallel with no explicit knowledge reuse, can be derived from a small set of facts and rules implemented in a knowledge-based system.