Research

In 2024 I defended my PhD in Computer Networks, Improving Network Failure Detection and Recovery with Programmable Data Planes, at the Networked Systems Group from ETH Zürich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Laurent Vanbever and co-examined by Dr. Stefano Vissicchio and Prof. Minlan Yu.

My thesis explored how programmable data planes can accelerate the detection, localization, and recovery from failures in large-scale networks (i.e., ISPs), with a particular focus on gray failures. I also worked on accelerating allreduce operations, a widely used data center communication primitive typically used to train machine learning models.

As part of my PhD work, I created and maintained p4-utils and p4-learning, two of the leading GitHub repositories to learn how to program and prototype programmable data plane networks in software. In 2021, I received the Outstanding TA Award from D-ITET at ETH Zürich for my teaching in the MSc course Advanced Topics in Communication Networks.

Before starting my PhD, I worked on traffic engineering for data center networks at NSG during my Master studies at ETH Zürich, and prior to that I worked at Disney Research Zurich on an empirical study of indoor 802.11ac WLANs, a thorough experimental characterization of throughput, jitter, and fairness using real testbeds and statistical analysis.

Improving Network Failure Detection and Recovery with Programmable Data Planes

Advisor: Prof. Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zürich)

Co-examiners: Dr. Stefano Vissicchio (University Collague London), Prof. Dr. Minlan Yu (Harvard)

ETH Zürich. Zürich, Switzerland (2024).

Canary: Congestion-aware in-network allreduce using dynamic trees

Daniele De Sensi, Edgar Costa Molero, Salvatore Di Girolamo, Laurent Vanbever, Torsten Hoefler

Future Generation Computer Systems · 2024

FAst in-network GraY failure detection for ISPs

Edgar Costa Molero, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference · 2022

Blink: Fast connectivity recovery entirely in the data plane

Thomas Holterbach, Edgar Costa Molero, Maria Apostolaki, Alberto Dainotti, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 19) · 2019

Hardware-accelerated network control planes

Edgar Costa Molero, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks · 2018

Evaluating 802.11 ac features in indoor WLAN: an empirical study of performance and fairness

Lito Kriara, Edgar Costa Molero, Thomas R Gross

Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation, and Characterization · 2016

Regression-based characterization of 802.11 Ac indoor performance

Edgar Costa Molero, Lito Kriara, Thomas Gross

Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking · 2015