IEEE INFOCOM 2006 Tutorials


April 23, Sunday 14:30-18:30

"Wireless Mesh Networking" 
  
Samir Das               SUNY Stonybrook, NY USA

"Internet Measurement"       
Yuval Shavitt          Tel Aviv U., Israel

April 24, Monday 09:00-13:00

"Availability-Based Service Provisioning  in Optical Networks" 

Dominic Schupke    Siemens, Munich

April 24, Monday 
14:30-18:30

"Using the Open Network Laboratory"
  
 Jonathan Turner    WUSTL, MO, USA

April 24, Monday 09:00-13:00 / 14:30-18:30

"Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Routing, MAC, and Transport Issues"

Nitin Vaidya            UIUC, IL, USA





"Wireless Mesh Networking"   
Samir Das               SUNY Stonybrook, NY USA

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks are multihop networks of wireless router platforms. The wireless routers are typically stationary, but the clients can be mobile. A mesh network can provide multihop communication paths between wireless clients – serving as a community network or as a broadband access network for the Internet. Wireless mesh networks are considered cost-effective alternatives to wireless LANs, as there is no necessity to deploy any wired infrastructure to support a mesh network. With the plummeting cost of 802.11-based hardware platforms, wireless mesh networking is gaining ground with several industry players developing 802.11-based mesh networking platforms and services. Large-scale, metropolitan wide mesh networks are also planned.

There are several technical challenges that must be addressed for mesh networking to be as effective as any other form of broadband networking. Much of these challenges relate to multihop wireless communication and limited capacity. This tutorial is designed to introduce essential mesh networking concepts, lay down the technological challenges and describe how the research community is addressing them. We will explore the issues associated to each layer of the protocol stack as well as various approaches that span across layers, such as capacity and fairness issues. We will also discuss the experiences and lessons learnt from various experimental testbeds, as well as standards activities. Techniques to build simple mesh network platforms will be explained.

Intended Audience

The intended audience includes students and faculty in universities interested in study and research in mesh networking, and industry practitioners interested in research and development of mesh networking products, systems and applications. Basic computer networking knowledge is assumed.

Outline

  • Introduction
    Motivation and history
    Architectures and applications – last mile networking, community networking, etc.

  • Routing Issues
    Multihop routing – routing protocols
    Designing routing metrics
    Access and handoff issues

  • Link Layer Issues
    Basic CSMA/CA based MAC protocols, IEEE 802.11, limitations
    Use of multiple channels – multichannel MAC protocols
    Use of multiple radios – channel assignment problem
    Cross layer issues: joint channel assignment and routing

  • Physical Layer Issues
    Use of directional antenna
    Transmit power control
    Cross layer issues: protocols to utilize directional antennas and transmit power control

  • Transport Protocol Issues
    Impact of wireless transmission errors on TCP performance
    Issues with multihop wireless networks and mobility
    Various solution approaches

  • Issues Spanning All Layers
    Capacity
    Fairness
    Security, network management and monitoring

  • Testbeds, Commercial Products and Standards
    Mesh testbeds in academic and industrial research labs
    Commercial mesh networking products
    Building your own testbed
    Activities in IEEE 802.11s ESS mesh working group
    WiMAX and its potential role

Biography

Samir R. Das is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department in the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1994. His research interests include wireless multihop networking including ad hoc, mesh and sensor networks, performance evaluation and parallel discrete event simulation. He has published more than sixty refereed research articles on these topics.

Samir Das received the U.S. National Science Foundation’s CAREER award in 1998. He has been a speaker in the Distinguished Visitor program of the IEEE Computer Society during 2001-03. He co-chaired the program committee for the ACM MobiHoC Symposium in 2001 and ACM MobiCom Conference in 2004. He currently serves on the editorial board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM/Springer Wireless Networks Journal and the Ad Hoc Networks journal. For more information, please visit his web page: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~samir.


"Internet Measurement"       
Yuval Shavitt          Tel Aviv U., Israel

Abstract

The Internet is a vital tool in all aspects of today's life. However,its operation is far from been optimal, and in some cases satisfactory. In order to understand its operation and suggest waysto improve it, one needs to know the fundamental characteristics of the interactions in the network at all levels: packets, flows,devices, and entire networks. However, the Internet was not built with measurement as a fundamental feature, thus tools and techniques had to be built to enable measuring and analyzing various aspects of its operations.

This tutorial will give the participants a review of Internet measurement techniques at various levels. After a short review of basic Internet features, we will discuss the reasons for measuring the Internet, what can be measured, how, where and when can it be done, with examples from previous projects. The tutorial will also touch on modeling issues. A large part of the tutorial will focus on topology measurements, and will discuss the main challenges in this area.


Biography

Yuval Shavitt received the B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (cum laude), M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and D.Sc. from the Technion ---Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel in 1986, 1992, and 1996, respectively. From 1986 to 1991, he served in the Israel Defense Forces first as a system engineer and the last two years as a software engineering team leader. After graduation he spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Between 1997 and 2001 He was a Member of Technical Stuff at the Networking Research Laboratory at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ. Starting October 2000, Dr. Shavitt is a faculty member in the School of Electrical Engineering at Tel-Aviv University. He published 27 journal papers and over 40 conference papers, and holds close to 10 US, Canadian, European and Japanese patents. Dr. Shavitt served as TPC member for INFOCOM 2000 - 2003, 2005, IWQoS 2001 and 2002, ICNP 2001, MMNS 2001,and IWAN 2002 - 2005, and on the executive committee of INFOCOM 2000, 2002, and 2003. He is also the organizer of a DIMACS Workshop on Internet and WWW Measurement, Mapping and Modeling, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA, February, 2002, and the International Workshop on New Advances of Web Server and Proxy Technologies, Providence, RI, USA, May 2003. He served as a leading guest editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special issue on Internet and WWW Measurement, Mapping, and Modeling; and as a co-editor of a special issue on Web Servers and Content Distribution Networks (CDN) in the Journal of World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Shavitt was involved in the design of the IDMaps (Internet distance maps) project and is now leading the DIMES project to map and monitor the Internet using distributed software agents. DIMES, which was launched in September 2004, has increased the known AS level Internet connectivity by about 50% in its first year of operation.



"Availability-Based Service Provisioning  in Optical Networks"
Dominic Schupke    Siemens, Munich

Abstract

Every optical transport network service is subject to potential outage caused by failures within the network. Using different recovery mechanisms, the availability of a service can be improved, in order to achieve a desired availability level for the customer. This availability level is typically fixed in a service level agreement (SLA) between the customer and the network operator. In traditional approaches, paths in the network are provisioned without inclusion of the service availability. In a subsequent step the service availability is calculated and its availability satisfaction is checked. Further consideration is needed if the desired availability is not reached. Novel approaches take service availability directly into account. Thus, the path design can guarantee that target availabilities are met. The aim is to achieve design optimality subject to availability constraints, which are, however, often challenging because of their non-linear nature. Several solutions have been recently proposed. After establishing a terminology and model framework, the tutorial summarizes these approaches and identifies further research issues within the field. Many of the methodologies do not only apply to optical networks, but are also usable for other network technologies.


Biography

Dominic A. Schupke studied electrical engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany and at Imperial College London, UK. He received his Dipl.-Ing. degree from RWTH Aachen in 1998. From 1998 to 2004 he was research and teaching staff member of the Institute of Communication Networks at Munich University of Technology (TUM),Germany. He received the Dr.-Ing. degree (with distinction) from TUM in 2004. At the institute, he was involved in research projects with both industrial and academic partners. In summer 2003, he was visiting researcher at TRLabs, Edmonton, Canada. In 2004, he joined the research and development department of Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Munich. There, he is Senior Research Scientist and project leader. His research interests are in the area of transport
networks. This includes network architectures and protocols (multilayer networks, optical networks, IP/MPLS networks, Ethernet networks), routing and wavelength assignment, recovery methods,availability analysis, network optimization, and network planning. He authored or co-authored more than 20 conference and journal papers in the area of network resilience and availability analysis. Dominic has been technical program committee member for the IEEE conferences ICC and Globecom, from 2004 to 2006, and the 2005 conferences DRCN and ONDM. He is member of IEEE, VDE, and VDI.


"Using the Open Network Laboratory"
 Jonathan Turner    WUSTL, MO, USA

Abstract

The Open Network Laboratory (www.onl.wustl.edu) is a resource designed to enable experimental evaluation of advanced networking concepts in a realistic operating environment. The laboratory is built around a set of open-source, extensible, high performance routers, that can be accessed by remote users through a Remote Laboratory Interface (RLI). The RLI allows users to configure the testbed network, run applications and monitor those running applications using built-in data gathering mechanisms. Support for data visualization and real-time remote display is provided. The RLI also allows users to extend the functionality of the system by adding plugins that run on embedded processors at each router port. Plugins can re-direct packets to different destinations, modify packet contents, make copies of packets and can interact with the hardware forwarding mechanisms to modify how the hardware handles specific packet flows. The hardware provides wire speed packet filtering and a flexible queueing subsystem that can be used to provide bandwidth guarantees to selected flows or flow aggregates. The routers are architecturally similar to high performance commercial routers, enabling researchers to evaluate their ideas in a more realistic context than can be provided by PC-based routers. The Open Network Laboratory is designed to provide a setting in which systems researchers can evaluate and refine their ideas and develop compelling demonstrations.
This tutorial will teach users how to use the ONL. It will include detailed presentations on the system architecture and principles of operation, as well as detailed examples of ONL usage.

Outline:

1. Overview
2. System Architecture
- core switch
- hardware packet processing
- embedded processor and plugin environment
3. Remote Laboratory Interface
- getting started
- creating network topology
- configuring routes and packet filters
- monitoring network activity, data visualization tools
- using traffic generators
- configuring and using plugins
- developing new plugins


Biography

Jonathan S. Turner received the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Northwestern University in 1979 and 1981. He holds the Henry Edwin Sever Chair of Engineering at Washington University, and is Director of the Applied Research Laboratory, which carries out advanced networking research and is concentrating on technologies for high performance, dynamically extensible networks.
He served as Chief Scientist for Growth Networks, a startup company that developed scalable switching components for Internet routers and ATM switches, before being acquired by by Cisco Systems in early 2000.
Professor Turner's primary research interest is the design and analysis of switching systems, with special interest in systems supporting multicast communication. His research interests also include the study of algorithms and computational complexity, with particular interest in the probable performance of heuristic algorithms for NP-complete problems.
Turner is a fellow of ACM and a fellow of the IEEE. He received the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award from the IEEE in 1994 and the IEEE Millenium Medal in 2000. He has been awarded more than 20 patents for his work on switching systems and has many widely cited publications.





"Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Routing, MAC, and Transport Issues"
Nitin Vaidya            UIUC, IL, USA

Abstract

When designing mobile ad hoc networks, several interesting and difficult problems arise due to shared nature of the wireless medium, limited transmission range of wireless devices, node mobility, and energy constraints. This tutorial will present an overview of selected issues related to medium access control (MAC), routing, and transport in mobile ad hoc networks, including some interaction between the different layers of the protocol stack. Selected techniques to improve performance of MAC, routing and transport protocols will be discussed.
In addition, the tutorial will briefly discuss some implementation-related issues.

The topics covered include:
  • Introduction to mobile ad hoc networks
  • Wireless medium access control protocols (classification and examples)
  • Unicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (classification and examples)
  • Performance of TCP in mobile ad hoc networks, and techniques to improve TCP performance
  • Implementation-related issues
  • Related standards activities

Biography

Nitin Vaidya received the Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is presently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Sun Microsystems and the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay. His current research is in wireless networking and mobile computing. He co-authored papers that received awards at the ACM MobiCom and Personal Wireless Communications (PWC) conferences. Nitin's research has been funded by various agencies, including the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Motorola, Microsoft Research and Sun Microsystems. Nitin Vaidya is a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. Nitin has served on the committees of several conferences, including as program co-chair for 2003 ACM MobiCom and General Chair for 2001 ACM MobiHoc. He has served as an editor for several journals, and presently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.
For more information, please visit http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~nhv/.