About me
I am Vidhya aka Vidhyashankar Venkataraman. I am a final year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University. I work with Prof. Paul Francis on building a transport protocol for long-haul networks. This project is in collaboration with Dr. T. V. Lakshman and Dr. Murali Kodialam of Bell Laboratories (Alcatel-Lucent), Murray-Hill, NJ.
I am right now looking for full-time industrial (research and development) positions. You can find my updated CV/ Resume provided in the links below.
I am also interested in quantitative and analytical positions in financial institutions. I did my minor in Finance at Johnson School (Cornell). You can find my resume here.
In the past, I have worked with Prof. Paul Francis on a peer-to-peer streaming protocol called Chunkyspread. My research interests include networking and distributed systems. I have done internships at Yahoo! and Bell laboratories (Alcatel-Lucent) in the past.
I enjoyed being a teaching assistant for the course "Large-scale architectural models on the Internet" with Prof. Alan Demers. The course involved projects with Amazon's cloud computing services and Hadoop map-reduce API. I had a lot of fun doing the course which also involved me taking a few lectures during the semester. I have also been a teaching assistant to the undergraduate courses, Computer Networks and Computer Architecture, in the past.
I completed my undergraduate study at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.
ContactVidhyashankar Venkataraman
316 Upson Hall
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Phone: 607 255 0226
Email: vidya AT cs DOT cornell DOT edu
Research
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Long-haul Transport The inadequacies of TCP in high bandwidth-delay-product networks
have been well-studied in theory and in practice over the past
decade. Many attempts have been made at designing transport
protocols that operate more aggressively than TCP and yet are
stable and fair. Recent ones exploit finer-grained feedback from
the network, either explicitly as with XCP, or implicitly as with
FastTCP. We have proposed a new approach to increased
aggressiveness that is complementary to previous approaches. We
make use of priority queuing in routers available in the
form of DiffServ by assigning the packets from a given transport
flow into two prioritized flows. The higher priority flow
operates with the legacy congestion control while the
lower priority flow aggressively exploits spare capacity in the
network while not interfering with the other participating
flows. This isolation of the
aggressive flow into strictly lower priority queues gives us
more latitude in how to operate the aggressive component.
Vidhyashankar Venkataraman, Paul Francis, Murali Kodialam, T. V. Lakshman. A priority layered approach to transport for high bandwidth delay product networks, To appear in the 4th ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (ACM CoNEXT 2008). Talk Slides
A-exam talk.
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P2P Multicast: The rising popularity of live IPTV has triggered renewed interest in P2P multicast. In particular, the simple and robust `swarming' style of P2P multicast is currently favored over more traditional tree-based approaches, which are seen to be complex and fragile. Swarming approaches, however, exhibit a basic control-overhead-versus-latency tradeoff that gears it more towards high-volume, latency-tolerant applications. We designed a new unstructured P2P multicast protocol called Chunkyspread that is tree-based yet simple and robust. Chunkyspread uses multiple trees to provide fine-grained control over member load, reacts quickly to membership changes, scales well, and has low overhead. We showed that Chunkyspread exhibits far better control over transmit load than Splitstream, while exhibiting comparable or better latency and responsiveness to churn. This comparison established Chunkyspread as the `best of breed' among tree-based P2P multicast algorithms, thus setting the stage for future comparisons with swarming-based approaches.
Vidhyashankar Venkataraman, Kaouru Yoshida, Paul Francis. Chunkyspread: Heterogeneous Unstructured Tree-based Peer to Peer Multicast, In The Fourteenth IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, (Nov 2006). Talk Slides
Vidhyashankar Venkataraman, Paul Francis, John Calandrino. Chunkyspread: Multitree Unstructured Peer to Peer Multicast, In The Fifth International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, February 2006. Talk Slides
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QoS provision on Mesh networks: (Undergraduate work)
We proposed an on-demand QoS routing protocol
and heuristics for the slot allocation process in asynchronous single
channel wireless mesh networks in the presence of hidden terminals.
The heuristics had been adapted to
provide an extended battery life for the power constrained mobile nodes
and hence reduce the number of battery recharges. The parent and the
adapted heuristics were compared in terms of delay and number of battery
recharges. Simulation studies showed that the parent heuristics show
better results with respect to delay while the adapted heuristics perform
better in terms of the number of deaths of mobile nodes.
V. Vidhyashankar, B.S. Manoj, C. Siva Ram Murthy. Slot allocation schemes for delay sensitive traffic support in asynchronous wireless mesh networks, In The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 2005.
V. Vidhyashankar, B.S. Manoj, and C. Siva Ram Murthy. Slot Allocation Schemes for Delay Sensitive Traffic Support in Asynchronous Wireless Mesh Networks, In HiPC’ 03.
Education
| Cornell University, Ithaca, NY |
Ph.D Department of Computer Science, Advisor: Paul Francis |
Aug 2003 - Dec 2008 (expected) |
| Cornell University, Ithaca, NY |
MS Department of Computer Science, Advisor: Paul Francis |
Aug 2003 - Dec 2007 |
| Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Chennai, India |
B.Tech Dept of Computer Science, Advisor: C. S. R. Murthy |
Jul 1999 - May 2003 |
Other interests
I served as the treasurer of SPICMACAY-Cornell for two years (2005-2007). We organized concerts of renowned Indian artists. In particular, the concerts of Sanjay Subramaniam and Shashank were grand successes.
I have taken Jump Swing classes for two semesters and Salsa for one. Fun, fun, fun! I love dancing, in general.
