Nicol and Schear win best paper award

7/3/2008 Jenny Applequist, Information Trust Institute

A paper co-authored by ECE Professor David Malcolm Nicol and his student Nabil Schear has brought home the Best Paper award from the 22nd ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2008).

Written by Jenny Applequist, Information Trust Institute

David Malcolm Nicol
David Malcolm Nicol

A paper co-authored by ECE Professor David Malcolm Nicol and his student Nabil Schear has brought home the Best Paper award from the 22nd ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2008).

In the winning paper, entitled "Performance Analysis of Real Traffic Carried with Encrypted Cover Flows," the authors explore the possibility of providing protection to network traffic by tunneling it inside synthetically generated traffic. The approach creates additional costs and has the potential to increase delivery time of the traffic so much that it renders the system unusable. Therefore, Schear and Nicol studied ways to analyze the characteristics of real traffic that can be carried by cover traffic without impacting a user's perception of his or her interaction with the Internet. Their work combined simulation and analytical modeling in an innovative way. Simulation was used to generate measurements of traffic behavior, and then the measurements were used to validate the separately developed analytical models that study how much time the traffic will take and whether the scheme can keep up with demand.

"Our paper shows that it's possible to take measurements from real or simulated traffic and use them to estimate parameters for an accurate analytic model of tunneling, without the measurements or simulations having any notion at all of tunneling," the authors explained. "The nature of our problem allows for an interesting and useful decoupling of models."

Nicol is the theme leader for Critical Infrastructures and Homeland Defense research in the Information Trust Institute at Illinois. His main research interests are in high-performance computing, modeling and simulation of large-scale systems, networks, and cyber security. Schear is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois, with a focus on research in systems, networking, and security.

The Best Paper award was presented at the PADS workshop, which was held June 3-6, 2008 in Rome, Italy. The workshop series that became PADS began in 1985 and has since become a leading forum for presentation of research findings in all aspects of simulation technology. The workshop is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Simulation, the IEEE's Computer Society Technical Committee on Simulation, and the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS).


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This story was published July 3, 2008.