Most existing reliable transport protocols in the current Internet architecture, like TCP, rely on an end-to-end connection as the main architectural construct to implement reliable transfer of data. This has become a big problem for content- oriented Internet applications because connections are brittle; in most protocols, the context exchange must be restarted if a connection is lost, a specific site must be selected to start the connection supporting content retrieval, and in-network caching cannot be used without relying on third parties applications such as CDN to replicate content-delivery functionality to only a subset of its users. As a result, several Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures have been developed that focus on information-centricity and eliminate connections between remote processes at the transport layer through modifications in the network infrastructure. However, this can only be achieved by requiring a far more complex network layer. In addition, transparent in-network caching is meant to be a vital benefit of these solutions, with the content being cached opportunistically throughout the network where it is needed. However, intermediate routers and caches have access to the content object being transferred to consumers, which poses privacy concerns.

To address these problems, this thesis proposes a new way of improving the Internet’s architecture at the transport layer through a novel method of transport- ing data without using end-to-end connections and enables the use of transparent caching at the transport layer while preventing caches from decoding cached con- tent.

The Internet Transport Protocol (ITP) is introduced as an alternative to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for reliable end-to-end transport services in the IP Internet. The design of ITP is based on Walden’s early work on host-host protocols, and the use of receiver-driven Interests and manifests advocated in several information-centric networking architectures. The design of ITP proves that connections or significant changes to the routing infrastructure are not needed to provide efficient and reliable data exchange between two remote processes on the Internet. Through minor extensions to the Domain Name System (DNS), ITP design can be leveraged to provide efficient content delivery by name over the existing IP Internet allowing it to achieve NDN advantages without the need for a new routing infrastructure. The use of manifests to describe contents glob- ally at the transport layer eliminates the need for a new ICN like technology by allowing data to be cached at the transport layer and preventing these caches from understanding cached contents by enforcing decoding methods as part of the manifests.

The original use of the Internet was to share expensive resources by addressing endpoints using IP addresses. These days the Internet is mostly used to access distributed content rather than to share resources, but we still end up addressing endpoints in order to access distributed content. Named Data Networking (NDN) is an approach where content names are addressable, rather than endpoints. NDN's main approach is moving the internet towards a content distribution architecture and provides better support to mobile devices compared to TCP/IP. One of the design concerns of NDN is congestion control, which is the topic of this paper. Many recent studies on congestion control in NDN suggest either using an end-to-end approach or a hop-by-hop approach. Our NDN Congestion Control Protocol (CCP) is designed to detect and control congestion at the consumer end without the use of RTT measurements or congestion signaling. CCP is a receiver driven, window based protocol that can detect and control congestion by making use of measurements of delay along the forwarding path. We implement CCP using ndnSim simulator and compare it to an end-to-end AIMDD (additive increase/multiplicative decrease) scheme that behaves the same way as TCP.

Model predictive control (MPC) is an advanced control strategy widely used in the process industries and beyond. Therefore, industry is interested in the development of MPC formulations that can enhance safety, reliability, and economic profitability of chemical processes. Motivated by these considerations, this dissertation focuses on the development of methods for integrating process operational safety and process economics within model predictive control system designs. To accomplish these critical control objectives, various economic model predictive control (EMPC) schemes that maintain the process state within a safety region in state-space while optimizing process economics are considered for the first time. The safety region is assumed in the first part of the dissertation to be a level set of a Lyapunov function which is made forward invariant through appropriate MPC design. However, safety-based constraints may define a safety region that is irregularly shaped, and therefore, the safety region may not be taken to be a level set of a Lyapunov function in general. Hence, the second part of this thesis proposes an economic model predictive control (EMPC) formulation that utilizes a Safeness Index function (a function that measures the safeness of points in state-space) as a hard constraint to define a safe region of operation termed the safety zone. Such a safety zone is not restricted to be a level set of a Lyapunov function and may be irregularly shaped. While the two initial safety-based EMPC formulations explicitly handle process safety and economic considerations, they are centralized in nature and may lead

to control action calculations that exceed the allowable sampling period. To address this potential practical limitation of the centralized safety-based EMPC designs, the third part of this dissertation addresses the development of distributed EMPC architectures with safety-based constraints. Both sequential and iterative distributed control architectures, and the partitioning of inputs between the various optimization problems in the distributed structure based on their impact on process operational safety, are investigated. Chemical process examples will be used throughout the thesis to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed control methods.