The first part of my talk will be on the Implications of Selfish Neighbor Selection in Overlay Networks. Following, is a brief description of this work:

"In overlay network for routing or content sharing, each node must select a fixed number of immediate overlay neighbors for routing traffic or requests for content. A selfish node entering such a network would select neighbors so as to minimize the weighted sum of expected access costs to all destinations. Previous work on selfish neighbor selection has built intuition with simple models where edges are undirected, access costs are modelled by hop-counts, and nodes have potentially unbounded degree. In practice however, important side constraints not captured by these models lead to richer games with substantively and fundamentally different outcomes. Our work models neighbor selection as a game involving directed links, constraints on the number of allowed neighbors, and costs reflecting both network latency and node preference. We express a node's (best response) wiring strategy to a directed version of the k-median problem and use this observation to obtain pure Nash equilibria. We study the performance of such wirings analytically and also experimentaly on synthetic topologies as well as on measurements and maps collected from PlanetLab and the AS-level Internet, respectively. Our results indicate that selfish nodes can reap substantial performance benefits when connecting to overlay networks composed of non-selfish nodes. On the other hand, in overlays that are dominated by selfish nodes, the resulting stable wirings are optimized to such great extent, that even non-selfish newcomers can extract near-optimal performance through naive wiring strategies."

The second part of the talk will provide an overview of my research in the areas of content distribution and overlay networks. I will briefly touch upon the following:

-- Distributed Selfish Replication and Caching

-- Distributed Placement of Service Facilities in Large-Scale Networks

-- Storage Capacity Allocation for Content Networks

-- Analytic Modeling of Replacement Algorithms and Application to the Interconnection of Cache Memories

-- The Cache Inference Problem and Its Application to Content and Request Routing

-- Optimization of Playout Schedulers for Packet Video Receivers

I will conclude my talk with a few pointers into on-going and future research on the aforementioned and other related areas.