Networked Systems Research at Northwestern

We study the Internet as a global critical infrastructure – the thing the world depends on but barely understands. Our work blends large-scale measurement, distributed systems, and real-world experimentation to uncover how today’s Internet actually operates: the hidden dependencies, opaque routing behavior, and fragile links that shape global connectivity.

Our work is grounded in experiment: building systems, deploying them at scale, and using measurement to expose how networked systems actually behave. That visibility drives both our understanding of the Internet’s hidden machinery and the design of better, more resilient systems—especially as the Internet’s fate becomes entangled with geopolitics and economics, and routinely put to the test by natural disasters.