Online social networks have revolutionized the way we interact and share information over the Internet, and social networking applications such as YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc., have millions of active users. While already being enormously popular, these applications only scratch the surface of online social networking possibilities. The goal of this research project is to investigate and find new and creative ways of how to make use of social networking applications to enrich people's everyday lives.

Internet routers require buffers to hold packets during times of congestion. The buffers need to be fast, and so ideally they should be small enough to use fast memory technologies such as SRAM or all-optical buffering. Unfortunately, a widely used rule-of-thumb says we need a bandwidth-delay product of buffering at each router so as not to lose link utilization. This can be prohibitively large.

The concept of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has received considerable interests recently. A P2P network has no centralized management but all network functionalities are provided by the peers (nodes) themselves in a distributed manner. The most popular P2P systems are file sharing systems, however P2P networking is not restricted to file sharing, but could be applied to any system where peers pool their resources (e.g., files, storage, compute cycles, communication bandwidth) in order to inexpensively handle tasks that would normally require large costly servers. In our research, we focus on issues evolving around resource allocation and cooperation among peers.

Rate control is one of the most important problems in computer networks. If input rates to a network are left uncontrolled, then the offered load may exceed the network capacity causing congestion, i.e. buffers fill up and packets have to be dropped. It is well known that network congestion has a negative impact on performance, potentially leading to a throughput collapse. Rate control schemes should therefore (a) produce a predictable throughput, (b) allow a distributed implementation and (c) allocate network bandwidth among applications (flows) in a fair manner.

A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of nodes which form a network independently of any fixed base station infrastructure. As opposed to networks which use routers to support networking functions such as packet routing and forwarding, in ad hoc networks these functions are provided by the nodes (hosts) themselves.

Content Delivery (or, Distribution) Network is an effective approach to improve Internet service quality. CDNs evolves with the promise of higher scalability for the content providers and higher availability and lower user response time for the end users.