Computer Science & Engineering professor receives grant from National Science Foundation

Raj Jain, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering, has received a two-year, $200,000 collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation for research titled "Eager: An Application Delivery Platform for Mobile Apps on Global Clouds."

The collaborative grant between Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Washington University in St. Louis will fund research to develop a next generation Internet architecture for supporting mobile apps using cloud computing centers distributed throughout the globe.

 

In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in mobile applications, most of which need to serve global audiences. Cloud computing provides unique opportunities for the application service providers to manage and optimize application delivery over geographically distributed computing resources. The PIs of this project are developing an open application delivery network platform which will allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to offer load balancing, fault tolerance, and numerous other application delivery services to the application service providers.

 

The PIs also plan to augment the flow abstraction layer of Software Defined Networks to add adequate support for application-level flows using several other recent innovations such as cross-layer communication, ID/Locator split, MPLS-like label switching. The claims will be validated through a proof-of-concept implementation of a use-case scenario designed over a prototype switch implementation.

 

A goal of the proposed design is to be evolutionary in the sense that it can coexist and is backward compatible with the current Internet and can be deployed incrementally now with a small number of new devices. The in-going research is designed to transform application delivery over the Internet. It would make significant contributions towards developing a set of generic architectural primitives that may be used for developing application specific networks on shared network infrastructure.