Approximate Networking H. T. Kung Harvard University Panel 1 on “What Are the Biggest Opportunities in Networking Problem?” NITRD Workshop on Complex Engineered Networks Washington, DC September 20-21, 2012

Wireless Networking Is Important But... Peak bandwidth is physically limited for any given frequency band Further exploitation in diversity (e.g., multipath and fine-grained beamforming) is getting increasingly difficult Gap in meeting application demands is growing Thus we need to find ways to fill the gap without violating Shannon's capacity theorem

Fortunately, There Are Opportunities Many applications don’t need networks for exact packet delivery, for example: – Sensor data processing – Big data analysis – Probability distribution estimation – Image/vision object recognition and tracking – Machine learning – Biologically inspired systems For these applications, approximate networking may be sufficient: – Deliver fraction of packets – Deliver approximate packets – Deliver combined packets

Advantages We can use approximate network node hardware and protocols, and traffic-reducing networks This allows efficient network implementation and robust network management Moreover, this enables new security means, e.g., integrated encryption and compression using secret distortion distribution keys rather than compression followed by encryption Theory in network coding and compressive sensing can be exploited

Summary We have argued that approximate networking, especially for wireless networking, is a good opportunity for future networking