Luo Mai a student here in the Department of Computing has been awarded a prestigious Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship

Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship

Lou Mai an MRes student here in the Department of Computing has been awarded a prestigious Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship to support him in his PhD studies.  The Google Fellowship Programs recognize outstanding graduate students who are doing exceptional work in computer science. Lou Mai's project (supervised by Dr Paolo Costa) was the only Fellowship  to be awarded in the area of Cloud Computing. Well done Lou Mai.

A brief summary of his proposal is below:

TITLE: NaaS: Network-as-a-Service in the Cloud
 
ABSTRACT
 
Cloud computing realises the vision of utility computing. Tenants can benefit from on-demand
provisioning of computational resources according to a pay-per-use model and can outsource hardware purchases and maintenance. Tenants, however, have only limited visibility and control over network resources and even for simple tasks tenants must resort to inefficient overlay networks.
To address these shortcomings, we propose Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), a paradigm that integrates current cloud computing offerings with direct yet secure access to the network infrastructure by tenants. NaaS-enabled tenants can easily deploy custom routing and multicast protocols. Further, by modifying the content of packets on-path, they can efficiently implement advanced network services, such as in-network data aggregation, redundancy elimination and smart caching. We believe that NaaS has the potential to revolutionise the current cloud offerings because it
would increase the performance of tenants’ applications –through efficient forwarding and in-network
operations– but also reduce development complexity by combining (distributed) computation and network in a single, coherent, abstraction. This would provide a significant step towards realising the
vision of the data centre is the computer!