This project team strives to enhance Internet applications like streaming video, online gaming and video conferencing by optimizing the inherent flows of information at the route of such tools.
Dr. Baochun Li , University of Toronto
The past decade has witnessed the proliferation of Internet applications. From web browsers in cellular phones to cafes with public wireless Internet access, from broadband home network connections to networked computers at workplaces, from electronic mail to IP telephony — the Internet has been integrated into our everyday life and is changing the way we live. The most significant category of Internet applications, when measured in traffic volume, is data dissemination, which accounts for over 70% of today’s Internet data flows. These include applications such as the distribution of software patches, peer-to-peer transmission of movie files, the streaming of stored or live media, video conferencing, online group gaming, and Internet-assisted remote collaboration of musical performance. They share the common property that digital information, often in a large volume, is requested by and delivered across the Internet to multiple users. Such applications are modelled as multicast in the networking community. A substantial amount of research efforts has been devoted to improving the performance of multicast applications in recent years. Researchers from both computer science and communication theory have been trying to understand the underlying structure of information multicast, create mathematical models for it, and design effective algorithms that optimize its end-to-end throughput and transmission cost. A recent trend is to explicitly account for the fact that information flows may be encoded during the course of routing. This is a breakthrough from previous multicast frameworks where only replication and relay of data are considered, and reduces the complexity of optimal multicast from computationally infeasible to practically solvable. This project team strives to enhance Internet applications like streaming video, online gaming and video conferencing by optimizing the inherent flows of information at the route of such tools.