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Thesis: This thesis is concerned with three aspects of routers in the Internet --- (1) Making them faster, (2) making them safe from performance attacks, and, (3) enabling them to provide deterministic performance guarantees.
Dissertation Roadmap: I tried to make this thesis accessible to a broad set of readers, including students, engineers, mathematicians and the casual reader. The load balancing arguments in Chapters 2, 3,4,5,6 and 10 only use combinatorial arguments and can be understood with a high-school knowledge of mathematics. Router architects and networking engineers should benefit from the widely used caching algorithms presented in Chapters 7, 8 and 9. Their analysis is more sophisticated, and their proofs can be skipped by the casual reader.
Switch designers should look into a practical caching technique described in Chapter 5 which eliminates the need for complex (preferred and forced) stable marriage algorithms. Chapter 10 describes a load balancing algorithm which can be of interest to any systems engineer building high-performance systems which need memory acceleration. The proofs in Appendix D, H and I are more involved, and use adversarial analysis, Lyapunov functions and fluid model theory, and are meant to be understood by advanced graduate students in networking.
Writing: If you have ever read a patent or a document in law, you will realize how ridiculously frustrating the style of writing can be. After a lot of guidance in writing, and after reading some beautifully well written books over the past few years (see Bill Bryson's -- A short history of nearly everything), I was motivated to make the writing style precise, easy to read and conversational. I also attempted a bit of humor in places where I thought it was relevant. But I have tried to ensure that it didn't detract from the main flow of the thesis. Apologies if I havent reached that goal. And I hope you enjoy the reading!
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