Network Architectures

The Internet is an essential enabler of our daily lives. We aim to understand how it works in practice and we develop new concepts that ensure its robustness for the future.

NetArch Overview

Focus Areas

Aspects that we frequently study include but are not limited to the following:

  • Internet transport (TCP, QUIC)
  • The web (HTTP, CDNs)
  • Video conferencing
  • Congestion management (congestion control and active queue management)
  • Network telemetry

Assessing the Internet & Internet Protocols

The Internet is a complex system that is driven by a large number of participants with significant heterogeneity. Hence, while many behaviors are standardized in IETF RFCs, the actual behavior largely depends on how implementers interpret the RFCs with their implementations. As a foundation for our work, we thus strive for creating an understanding of how the Internet and its protocols work in practice. For this, we make use of a large spectrum of methods that range from protocol analysis to testbed-based studies and, ultimately, internet-wide measurements.
Internet Protocol Stack

Optimizing & Innovating the Internet

In our studies, we frequently find aspects of the Internet that work not as well as they could. Thus, relying on our understanding of the current state of the Internet, we aim to optimize existing methods and develop novel concepts that help in ensuring the robustness of the Internet in the future. Additionally, we study how new paradigms, such as in-network computing, can be conceptually harmonized with the Internet architecture.

Topics that we frequently tackle include but are not limited to the following:

  • Protocol innovation and optimization
  • Congestion management
  • Internet-scale in-network computing (transport issues, COIN, SDN, P4)

IETF / IRTF Contributions

The Internet is system with a very fast development pace. Hence, to keep up with latest Internet innovation and to ensure that our results get traction, we actively participate in the IETF and IRTF. For example, we consider latest trends in congestion management (CCWG, ICCRG), experiment with latest measurement mechanisms (IPPMWG), contribute to making the Internet more sustainable (GREENWG, SUSTAINRG), and have helped shaping future architectures that support in-network computing (COINRG). For this purpose, our members regularly attend IETF meetings.

Teaching Activities

Lectures and Labs

The technologies and concepts that form the basis of our research are prominently featured in our Bachelor-level Datenkommunikation lecture. Some extended concepts are also covered in our Advanced Internet Technology lecture as well as in Communication Systems Engineering.

Our group additionally actively supports our chair’s flagship Bachelor and Master lab ‘Practical Internet eXperience’ to help spread knowledge about the Internet architecture and the operation of CDNs.

Theses

Our group regularly advises a number of theses and we typically have several thesis topics available for motivated and talented students; you can see an excerpt of currently available theses from within the RWTH University network. As we have limited advising capacities, it might be that you do not find any topics published by us. In that case, or if you have specific interests, we encourage you to contact us directly, ideally following the guidelines provided here.

Current Projects

Selected Past Projects

Selected Publications

Congestion-Responsive Queuing for Internet Flows. Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS ‘25), May 12 - May 16, 2025, Honolulu, HI, USA. May 2025.
Use Cases for In-Network Computing. Internet Research Task Force. December 2024.
ECN with QUIC: Challenges in the Wild. Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC ‘23), Montreal, Canada. October 2023.
Instant Messaging Meets Video Conferencing: Studying the Performance of IM Video Calls. Proceedings of the Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA ‘23), Jun 26 - Jun 29, 2023, Naples, Italy. June 2023.
Evolving the End-to-End Transport Layer in Times of Emerging Computing In The Network (COIN). Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on New IP and Beyond, co-located with the 30th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2022, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. November 2022.
Determination of Throughput Guarantees for Processor-based SmartNICs. The 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT ‘21), Virtual Event Germany. December 2021.