Recent proposals on network virtualization provide a promising way to overcome the Internet impasse. The key idea of network virtualization is to build a diversified Internet to support a variety of network services and architectures through a shared platform. A major challenge in building the diversified Internet is to automatically assign substrate resources to virtual networks. In this project, we are focusing on developing schemes for virtual network assignment to achieve load balancing on both substrate links and nodes.

The premise of this project is that overlay networks are the future direction for the evolution of the Internet, providing an open-ended spectrum of new services and capabilities, utilizing the legacy IP network infrastructure for connectivity. Specifically, we focus on the architecture, application, implementation, and experimental evaluation of what we term the network exostructure to provide novel, on-demand and evolving services utilizing the IP infrastructure as a building block.

The need to deliver QoS guarantees combined with advances in IP-over-optical advances networking technologies motivates consideration of End-to-End All-Optical Service Provisioning. In this scenario, the end-users (customers) would deploy the capacity provisioned within the optical networks automatically, directly and all-optically. My research focus includes issues of routing, protection, performance evaluation and optical control plane design for large-scale multi-segment WDM networks.

This is a novel authentication scheme that asks the question ``are you human?'' (instead of ``who are you?''), and upon the correct answer to this question, can prove a principal to be a human being instead of a computer program. MHP helps solve old and new problems in computer security that existing security measures can not address properly such as password guessing attacks, automated service and information theft, and denial of service at the application layer.