Xiaowei Yang
Duke University, NC·Computer Science
Internet users notice delays when they bank, shop, video-call or play games online. One key technique for cutting this delay is IP anycast.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
IP anycast
Internet latency
Border Gateway Protocol
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Use randomized algorithms to reduce the number of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) experiments needed to predict anycast catchments, the set of users routed to each replica site.
- Test whether adding Internet topology information further reduces the number of BGP experiments needed for accurate anycast catchment prediction.
- Determine how multi-path routing and non-common BGP routing policies introduce errors into catchment prediction, and whether accounting for these practices could improve accuracy.
- Evaluate whether heuristics, such as the number and locations of sites, and divide-and-conquer techniques can scale anycast optimization, considering load balancing and resilience as well as latency.
More about the research
With anycast, a service copies its content to many replica servers around the world, all reachable at the same address, so that each user is routed to a nearby copy. In theory, more replica sites should mean lower delay. In practice, adding sites sometimes makes delays longer. This happens because the Internet's routing does not always send users to the closest site.
Why it matters
Many large online services rely on anycast to deliver content quickly. This project could give network operators and service providers practical tools to place replica servers where they actually reduce delay. That could lower latency for users of everyday applications while using fewer servers, and improve how well these systems balance load and tolerate failures.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lixin Gao
University of Massachusetts, MA·Computer Science
Design and implement CIRCA, a logically centralized architecture that offloads BGP route computation from thin-client routers to a cloud service, and release it as an open-source prototype.
Kenneth Calvert
University of Kentucky, KY·Computer Science
Determine where and how to connect Named-data Networking (NDN), which fetches data by name, inside a network domain with SCION, a secure routing system that carries traffic between domains.
David Choffnes
Northeastern University, MA·Computer Science
Design a system that lets network operators state routing goals, or intents, such as better performance or avoiding certain countries, and automatically configures routing announcements to control how traffic enters their network.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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