Salman Abdul Baset

My research at IBM Watson Lab is focused on cloud computing, particularly, oversubscription, patch management, SLAs, software defined networking, and OpenStack. I am a co-author of SPEC OSGcloud benchmark framework report, and am currently working on the standardization of cloud benchmark.

My PhD work was focused on the reliability, session quality, protocol design and standardization, measurement, and energy efficiency issues in peer-to-peer communication systems. I had proposed an analytical model for understanding reliability in these systems. The model allows system designers to compare the reliability of client-server VoIP systems like Vonage to p2p systems like Skype. I had built OpenVoIP, an open source, open protocol, peer-to-peer communication system and scaled it to 1,000 nodes on ~500 Planet Lab machines. Motivated by the use of TCP in Skype for traversing firewalls, I studied TCP's delay performance for real-time applications such as VoIP and live video streaming. I was the first to analyze the workings of the Skype protocol. I am also active in the IETF's P2PSIP working group and working on the standardization of a peer-to-peer protocol. I also explored the energy efficiency issues in IP-based communication systems.

I am also interested in performance issues in multicore servers and am intrigued by the tradeoffs and dependencies between reliability, performance, and energy tradeoffs in data centers.