Yehuda Ben-Shimol

Bio [2003]
Israel-born Yehuda teaches in the Department of Communication Systems Engineering in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In his student days he carried out research on relativistic electrodynamics. Since 1998 has been interested communication networks and systems research and is an active author of papers in these fields. Yehuda also plays the role of consultant to communication and networking companies and was the initiator of a Start-up company in the area of managed IP networks. During the NKS Summer School he was to be seen doing Tai-Chi, just one of the internal soft martial arts he practices. Yehuda's other interests include studying the origins of randomness in communication networks traffic patterns, from the perspective of finding practical applications and implementations of Stephen Wolfram's new kind of science.

Project Title
Generating Communication Networks Traffic with Simple Cellular Automata Rules

Project Abstract
Many researches point out that modern communication networks (e.g., Internet, LANs, cellular data networks) carry complex behaved traffic [1-3]. The exact reasons for this complex behavior is still not well understood. This phenomena may emerge from interactions among various traffic flows generated and forwarded by individual nodes of the communication network [1-3]. Other possibility is the combination of a vast number of individual traffic sources (i.e., end users) at the edges of the network. In research we will try to synteticaly generate, identify and understand the complexity of network traffic as it emerges from the interaction between adjacent nodes of communication networks.

We will try to explore the underlying mechanism of traffic complexity by generating a trivalent large network. The "communication mechanism" which excites the traffic between neighboring nodes will be an underlying totalistic one-dimensional cellular automaton (CA) [4] that is activated independently and simultaneously in each node of the network. As pointed in [4] the simplicity of such models allows us to explore (by exhaustive search) all the possible rules that belong to this type of CA's.

[1] K. Park and W. Willinger, "Self similar traffic: an overview", Self-similar network traffic: An overview. In Self-Similar Network Traffic and Performance Evaluation, K. Park and W. Willinger, editors, Wiley Interscience, 1999.

[2] W. E. Leland, M. S. Taqqu, W. Willinger, and D. V. Wilson, "On the selfsimilar nature of Ethernet traffic (extended version)", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 2, pp. 1¿15, 1994.

[3] J. Yuan and K. Mills, "Exploring Collective Dynamics in Communication Networks", Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Vol. 107, no. 2, pp. 179-191, 2002.

[4] S. Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, 2002.

Favorite 3-color Cellular Automata