Load Balancing and Parallelism for the Internet

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!