Zakaria Al-Qudah

I am ...

a PhD candidate of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) under the supervision of Prof. Michael Rabinovich. I got my MSc. degree also from EECS department at CWRU under the supervision of Prof. Vincenzo Liberatore and my BSc. degree from Yarmouk University, Jordan.

Research Interest:

I am interested generally in distributed systems and the Internet research. Specific subjects include the performance and security of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), efficient utility computing platforms, and Internet Measurements.

Recent Projects:

• Multi-Autonomous systems anycast CDNs (In progress):

  This project proposes a robost and realistic anycast CDN architecture which enables anycast CDNs to span multiple ASes.

• Internet Timeouts :

  In this project, I measure various kinds of timeouts in the Internet (specifically for t he Web). I am trying to demonstrate that timeouts in the Internet are unnecessarily long which open the door of easy Denial of Service attacks. I propose a mechanism to adaptively set these timeouts based on the current load at servers.

• Efficient Application Placement in a Dynamic Hosting Platform:

  In this project I proposed, implemented and evaluated fast, low resource-consuming web applications startup mechanisms. The purpose of this project is to enable the design of a significantly more agile application placement controllers than those available today.

• Anycast-Aware Transport for Content Delivery Networks:

  This project addresses the problem of connection disruptions in anycast CDNs especially for large file downloads. I proposed and evaluated a mechanism to handle these disruptions and I demonstrated the importance of such a mechanism for achieving fine-granularity of control in CDNs in general.

Past Projects:

• Stochastic Fair Queuing (SFQ): This project shows the statistical insignificance of any overhead imposed by a large number of queues in SFQ.

Graduate Courses:

I took several graduate level courses at CWRU including Internet Applications (EECS 600), Web Computing or Computer Networks II (EECS 425), Computer Architecture (EECS 419), VLSI design (EECS 485), Computer Security (EECS 444), and two statistics courses

Publications:

• Zakaria Al-Qudah, Michael Rabinovich, and Mark Allman. Web timeouts and their implications. Submitted for review.


• Sipat Triukose, Zakaria Al-Qudah, and Michael Rabinovich. Content delivery networks: protection or threat? In The 14th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security(ESORICS09), Saint Malo, France, September 2009. pdf


• Zakaria Al-Qudah, Hussein A. Alzoubi, Mark Allman, Michael Rabinovich, and Vincenzo Liberatore. Efficient application placement in a dynamic hosting platform. In The 18th International World Wide Web Conference(WWW 09), Madrid, Spain, April 2009. pdf


• Zakaria Al-Qudah, Seungjoon Lee, Michael Rabinovich, Oliver Spatscheck, and Jacobus Van der Merwe. Anycast-aware transport for content delivery networks. In The 18th International World Wide Web Conference(WWW 09), Madrid, Spain, April 2009. pdf


• Ahmad Al-Hammouri, Vincenzo Liberatore, Huthaifa Al-Omari, Zakaria Al-Qudah, Michael S. Branicky, and Deepak Agrawal. A co-simulation platform for actuator networks. In SenSys '07: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pages 383?384, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM. Demo abstract. pdf