CV

In winter 2008/2009 Tobias Amft began to study computer science, and one year later physics, at the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf. In summer 2012 he received the B.Sc. degree after submitting his bachelor thesis which focuses on topics in computer networks and communications. From 2009 until spring 2014 he was holder of a scholarship from the "Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes". Tobias Amft received the M.Sc degree in March 2014 from the Heinrich Heine University after submitting his master thesis with the title: "Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Merging Mechanisms for large-scale and dynamically partitioned Networks".

Since April 2014, Tobias Amft is a doctoral student and researcher in the Lab for Technology of Social Networks, led by Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kalman Graffi. Beside his research he is pursuing the M.Sc. degree in physics.

Research Activities

Nowadays, structured peer-to-peer networks are not only used for the dissemination of data objects over the Internet. Current research focuses on communication between people from all over the world. Oppositely to centralized server architectures, participants in peer-to-peer networks have similar capacities and functionalities. To fulfil certain requirements of a network, different peer-to-peer solutions have been proposed in the past.

The focus of research lies in the investigation of combinations of different peer-to-peer overlays which form a hierarchical overlay or overlay stack by this means. Doing this, basic properties of those hierarchical peer-to-peer overlays are identified, as well as mutual influences or arising interdependencies. 

Mainly, we concentrate on four major use-cases for which a common base of functionalities has to be found and evaluated:

1) Location based overlays allow to search for data items or peers with respect to geographical information, which is in contradiction to the distributed responsibilities for data items of peers in structured peer-to-peer overlays.

2) Opportunistic overlays help to identify partitioned networks. In case of occurring network partitioning events, alternative routes should be calculated, and disrupted networks should be merged. The exchange of data between different nodes should be affected as little as possible.

3) Online social networks based on peer-to-peer overlays are extremely robust against espionage or arbitrariness of governments which decide to switch off specific Internet services. Reason for this property is the distributed fashion of peer-to-peer networks, contrary to traditional servers which hold information about users in a central place. Open issues are to provide reachability of user-related content and its maintenance among trustful nodes.

4) Darknets enable communication between two or more participants of a network with special respect to their anonymity. Neither information about the sender of a message, nor information about its receiver must be traceable.

Furthermore, Tobias Amft's research interests include network communication systems, message encryption, network security issues and many other topics, not only related to peer-to-peer systems.

Publications

• Personal Publications
• Thesis Advised

Conferences

I attended the following conferences and workshops:

• IEEE P2P 2014
• NetSys 2015
• IEEE LCN 2015