Modeling and analysis of techniques to increase robustness in distributed systems.

The original “selling point” for decentralized networks has been file exchange, using the decentralized approach to diffuse the bandwidth cost between all the participating nodes, augmenting the robustness by avoiding single point of failures and control by sharing the responsibility between all nodes. While the most decentralized approaches are very efficient in terms of resilience, they are, by the same reason, more performance limited and harder to analyze. This analysis is usually the prerogative of simulation tools, a quite inefficient way to analyze the possibility space. We thus developed and present here a mathematical model for network interconnection, enabling the study and exploration of equilibriums and, by virtue of the abstraction of the model, perfectly applicable to any interconnection of networks, be them communication networks, social networks, or physical distribution networks. We also focused on decentralized networks, called MANETs, where communication between mobile nodes is purely ad-hoc based, exploit- ing rateless coding to minimize data loss due to transmission unreliability, and detecting malicious nodes sending corrupted packets, a hard to detect and prevent problem in a strongly distributed environments, using SIEVE, a custom developed algorithm.