Research

Brandon Schlinker is a third year PhD student in Computer Science at the Networked Systems Lab in the University of Southern California where he works with Professor Ethan Katz-Bassett. Brandon received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University in 2013. His current research focuses on improving the Internet’s performance, reliability, and security.

Research Summary

The Internet has a number of problems that degrade end user experience: infrastructure can fail, traffic can be sent across poorly performing paths, and networks can be hijacked by third parties. These problems have traditionally been difficult to tackle given the Internet’s decentralized structure, inherent barriers to adopting new technologies, and cost constraints. However, the rise of large content and cloud providers may create new opportunities for solving these problems. Many of these providers have built networks with unprecedented connectivity: they have diverse paths towards Internet destinations and can exchange traffic directly with many end user networks. Brandon is designing systems that take advantage of this rich connectivity to improve end user experience. To enable realistic experiments in this setting, Brandon is building PEERING, a BGP testbed that enables impactful routing research. PEERING has routers at over a dozen locations across three continents that directly interconnect with hundreds of real networks via BGP, enabling experiments to announce/select routes and send/receive traffic. In addition to using the testbed for his own research, Brandon is making PEERING available to the networking research community to support the research of others. The unprecedented control and visibility provided by PEERING have allowed researchers to become active participants in the Internet ecosystem and enabled numerous measurement and evaluation studies to date.