Nate Kushman Graduate student, CSAIL Massachusetts Institute of Technology 32 Vassar St. Cambridge, MA 02139 nkushman at csail.mit.edu Office: 32-G934 Tel: (617) 253-5596

CSAIL

I currently work with Prof. Dina Katabi on networking stuff. Before this I was an architect at Akamai for a few years.

Research

Resilient BGP Routing
• Self-Consisent BGP: A Domain Dividied Against Itself Cannot Stand
  Nate Kushman, Dina Katabi, and Bruce M. Maggs
  Under Submission
  
  This paper shows that more than half of the packet-loss caused by an inter-domain link failure can be traced back to iBGP. It presents SC-BGP, a modified version of iBGP which ensures that as long as at least one router in an AS continuously has a valid path to the destination, then no router in the AS will see BGP caused packet-loss. It also shows how SC-BGP can be combined with R-BGP to ensure continuous connectivity between all routers.
  
  
• R-BGP: Staying Connected In a Connected World
  Nate Kushman, Srikanth Kandula, Dina Katabi, and Bruce M. Maggs
  Appeared at NSDI 2007
  PDF, PS, Tech Report with full proofs (PDF), Slides
  
  This paper presents R-BGP a modified version of eBGP which ensures continuous connectivity between ASes (although not within a single AS). I'm making the simulation code for this paper available on a limited basis, so e-mail me if you're interested in it.
  
  
• Can You Hear Me Now?! It Must be BGP.
  Nate Kushman, Srikanth Kandula, Dina Katabi
  Appeared in CCR 2007
  PDF, PS
  
  This is a VoIP measurement study we did showing that about the half the periods of poor VoIP quality are highly correlated with BGP events, and could probably be avoided by a more resilent inter-domain routing protocol. This result helps motivate the solutions presented in the two papers above.
  
  
Other
• Performance Nonmonotonicities: A Case Study of the UltraSPARC Processor
  Master's Thesis
  PDF, PS
  
  In a previous life (before Akamai) I was a complier guy, and for my Master's Thesis I showed that just by adding NOPS you can improve the performance of the SPEC benchmarks by up to 9%. This was in reaction to the common practice (at the time) of publishing compiler papers presenting complicated complier techniques to achieve performance improvements of only 5-10%.