Marco Chiesa has joined Networking and Security and will be working with Scott Shenker on resilient routing tables.

Marco received his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Roma Tre. He began his PhD studies there in January 2011 and expects to graduate this December.

His research focuses mainly on theoretical analysis of routing protocols. He studied the problem of routing oscillations of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which arises when routers cannot agree on a single path along which a message should be forwarded. He studied this problem both in a static context, in which a route oscillation may arise because of conflicting router configurations, and in evolving networks, in which routing oscillations may arise during a migration from an oscillation-free network configuration to another oscillation-free network configuration. From October 2012 through this April, he collaborated with Dr. Michael Schapira, working on traffic engineering problems with Equal-Cost-Multi-Path (ECMP), a load-balancing mechanism in the Open-Shortest-Path-First protocol (OSPF).

While at ICSI, he works with Scott Shenker on static resilient routing tasks. One aspect of this is ensuring network connectivity in the face of link failures, which occur when one router is unable to send a message along a link. The challenge is to do it without exchanging failure information between routers. He is interested in devising algorithmic techniques that prevent forwarding loops to arise in the case of these failures. Forwarding loops occur when data being passed through nodes of a network ends up back at the same node it started from.

Marco enjoys sports, running, hiking, travelling, and playing piano. While here, he's been trying to teach himself the drums on the set we keep upstairs.