Abstract:
The de facto service architecture of current communication networks is heterogeneous, complex, ad hoc and not very well understood, which is in sharp contrast to the textbook presentations of network architectures. This prevailing situation provides an opportunity to revisit that architectural model and its invariants of communication networks, and to undertake a formal examination of its basic principles. Concentrating on the issues of naming, forwarding and routing, we provide an axiomatic basis for these fundamental concepts, which can then be used for formal analyses as well as for deriving working prototype implementations. What emerges is a new model of computation/communication, based on the notion of abstract switching elements that rewrite and forward messages. We present a "Universal Forwarding Engine", which is expressed in a simple imperative programming model. The algebraic foundations facilitate the development of an axiomatic basis for communication (ABC) presented as an extension of Hoare Logic.

Bio:
Sanjiva Prasad is a Professor of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and also in the Amar Nath and Shashi Khosla School of IT. He received his B Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1985 and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from SUNY, Stony Brook, USA in 1990 and 1991. His thesis, "Towards a symmetric integration of concurrent and functional programming" includes some of the early research in the design and semantics of higher-order concurrent programming languages with mobile code. He worked in the area of program verification at Odyssey Research Associates in Ithaca, USA from 1990-1992, and then at the European Computer-Industry Research Center (ECRC GmbH) in Munich, Germany from 1992-1994, where he worked on the Facile project based on his thesis work. From 1994 he has been at IIT Delhi, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor. In 1998-99, he was a visiting associate professor at BRICS, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

His research interests are primarily in formal methods and programming languages -- in particular, semantics of concurrency, distributed and mobile computation, and verification of network protocols and architectures. Process algebraic approaches to systems biology are a recent interest. He has written several conference and journal papers, and has been an invited speaker at the first DART workshop at Aalborg, Denmark in 1993 and at the first HLCL workshop at the Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK in 1995.

He is a member of the Indian Association for Research in Computer Science and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. He has also served on several international conference programme committees (FST TCS, POPL, Fossacs, ASIAN, SEFM, etc.), and as the programme co-chair of FST TCS 2000 and FST TCS 2007.