Abhimanyu Gosain

CitySense: An Urban-Scale Wireless Sensor Network and Testbed

In this paper, we present the vision for an open, urban-scale wireless networking testbed, called CitySense, with the goal of supporting the development and evaluation of novel wireless systems that span an entire city. CitySense is currently under development and will consist of about 100 Linux-based embedded PCs outfitted with dual 802.11a/b/g radios and various sensors, mounted on buildings and streetlights across the city of Cambridge. CitySense takes its cue from citywide urban mesh networking projects, but will differ substantially in that nodes will be directly programmable by end users. The goal of CitySense is explicitly not to provide public Internet access, but rather to serve as a new kind of experimental apparatus for urban-scale distributed systems and networking research efforts. In this paper we motivate the need for CitySense and its potential to support a host of new research and application developments. We also outline the various engineering challenges of deploying such a testbed as well as the research challenges that we face when building and supporting such a system.

Network Coding as a WiMAX Link Reliability Mechanism

We design and implement a network-coding-enabled reliability architecture for next generation wireless networks. Our network coding (NC) architecture uses a flexible thread-based design, with each encoder-decoder instance applying systematic intra-session random linear network coding as a packet erasure code at the IP layer. Using GENI WiMAX platforms, a series of point-to-point transmission experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the NC architecture to that of the Automatic Repeated reQuest (ARQ) and Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) mechanisms. In our scenarios, the proposed architecture is able to decrease packet loss from around 11-32% to nearly 0%; compared to HARQ and joint HARQ/ARQ mechanisms, the NC architecture offers up to 5.9 times gain in throughput and 5.5 times reduction in end-to-end file transfer delay. By establishing NC as a potential substitute for HARQ/ARQ, our experiments offer important insights into cross-layer designs of next generation wireless networks.

Enabling Campus Edge Computing Using GENI Racks and Mobile Resources

This paper presents the architecture of GENI edge cloud computing network in the form of compute and storage resources, a mobile 4G cellular edge and a high speed campus network connecting these components. This deployment is available across fifty campuses in the US, all interconnected via a nationwide Layer-2 network. We present these capabilities in the context of vehicular sensing and control applications running on police patrol cars on the Wayne State University campus allowing end-users and researchers to collect rich datasets for public safety surveillance, vehicle internal-state sensing and modeling, and emulating next generation connected vehicle technologies. In particular, the paper provides insights about the usefulness of local edge computing cloud infrastructure for novel connected vehicle applications with high sensitivity to latency and bandwidth.

Network Coding as a WiMAX Link Reliability Mechanism: An Experimental Demonstration

Our demonstration showcases a network-coding (NC)– enabled reliability architecture for next generation wireless networks. Our NC architecture uses a flexible thread-based design, applying systematic intra-session random linear network coding as a packet erasure code at the IP layer. Using GENI WiMAX platforms, a series of point-to-point transmission experiments are conducted to compare NC with Automatic Repeated reQuest (ARQ) and Hybrid ARQ (HARQ). At the application layer, Iperf and UFTP are used to measure throughput, packet loss and file transfer delay. In our selected scenarios, NC offers up to 5.9 times gain in throughput and 5.5 times reduction in file transfer delay, compared to HARQ and joint HARQ/ARQ. Our demonstration hence illustrates that lower-layer redundancy mechanisms such as HARQ and ARQ incur high cost since they operate at the packet-level. Conversely, running NC at higher layers (e.g., IP) amortizes the cost of redundancy over several packets, thus leading to higher efficiency.

4G Cellular Systems in GENI

Open, programmable networks are an important enabler for the future Internet because of their ability to support flexible experimentation and to evolve functionality as new network architectures are deployed on a trial basis. The NSF supported GENI initiative is an ongoing effort to build a national scale open programmable network using a combination of open switching, routing and wireless technologies. The main features of open networking devices used in such testbeds are: (a) an open API which provides access to link-layer technology parameters; (b) downloadable programmability of protocols used at the network layer; (c) virtualization of network resources such as routers and base stations in order to enable multiple simultaneous experiments; and (d) observability of key performance measures such as throughput and packet loss. At the start of the GENI project, it became clear that wireless edge networks and mobile devices are critically important to the future Internet, indicating the need for open programmable wireless access technologies that can be deployed to supplement the virtualized routers and server racks described in other chapters. As a first step, wireless access based on open/programmable WiFi access points has been provisioned into various campus deployments associated with GENI (see for example, the ORBIT testbed described in Chapter 4). Although WiFi is an important mode of access, an increasing proportion of Internet traffic originates from cellular devices such as smartphones, motivating consideration of open cellular systems using the latest available technologies such as 4G WiMax and LTE.

Transparent Insertion of Custom Logic in HTTP(S) Streams Using PbProxy

Cost and testing considerations limit the acceptance and deployment of technologies that make information exchanges more secure, reliable, semantically understandable, and self-improving. PbProxy is a flexible proxy that enables transparent insertion of custom logic into HTTP and HTTPS interactions. It has successfully been used to facilitate behavior-based prevention of phishing attacks, machine learning of Web service procedures, and Web browsing over disruption-tolerant networks by injecting custom logic into existing applications and communication streams. PbProxy encapsulates common functionality into a proxy base and supports customizable plugins to foster code reuse.

ThinGs In a Fog: System Illustration with Connected Vehicles

This paper presents ThinGs In a Fog (TGIF)- a system designed to support interdisciplinary research that fall under the broad context of the Internet of Things. The framework is based on an Edge Computing system design that distributes application processing to system compute nodes leveraging geographic compute location diversity of a Cloud-to-the-edge to support machine-to- machine interactions that potentially have real- time constraints. To provide further insight, we focus on Connected Vehicle as an exemplar application domain. This paper provides a summary of work-to-date, including results from a small prototype of the system deployed at Clemson University. We illustrate the system be presenting work-to-date on the design, implementation and evaluation of a Queue Warning which is an application that has been studied thoroughly by the transportation community. This particular application is nicely suited for illustrating the additional benefits and complexities associated with implementing well understood applications in emerging distributed computing environments expected to be supported by the IoT.

Evaluating 5G Multihoming Services in the MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture

In the recent years it has become increasingly evident that the current end-to-end host-centric communication paradigm will not be capable of meeting the ongoing demand for massive data rates and ultra-low latency. With the advent of fifth generation of cellular architecture (5G) to support these requirements on the wireless edge of the network, the need for core network solutions to play a complementary role is conspicuous. In this paper we present and tackle some of the challenges of deploying a Future Internet Architecture (FIA), called MobilityFirst (MF), specifically for 5G use case scenarios. We report our findings of the deployment based on a setup on a small- scale testbed (ORBIT) and a nation-wide distributed testbed (GENI), and illustrate some results for the use case of device multihoming, in comparison with current TCP/IP based solution, i.e. Multipath TCP.

GENI wireless testbed: An open edge ecosystem for ubiquitous computing applications

This demo presents the architecture of GENI (Global Environment of Network Innovations) [1] edge cloud computing network in the form of compute and storage systems, a mobile 4G LTE edge and a high speed campus network. GENIs edge computing strategy proceeds by deploying self-contained packages of network, computing, storage resources, or GENI Racks [2] connected via high speed fiber to LTE BS(s) across twelve campuses in the US, all interconnected via a nationwide research network. The GENI mobile computing resource manager is based on the Orbit Management framework (OMF) [3] and provides seamless access to the computing resources via the GENI Portal for experimentation, scheduling, data collection and processing of ubiquitous computing applications.

GENI wireless testbed: a flexible open ecosystem for wireless communications research: demo

This demo presents the architecture of GENI (Global Environment of Network Innovations) [1] edge cloud computing network in the form of compute and storage resources, a mobile 4G LTE edge and a high speed campus network connecting these components. GENIs edge computing strategy proceeds by deploying self-contained packages of network, computing, storage resources, or GENI Racks [2] connected via high speed fiber to LTE BS(s) across twelve campuses in the US, all interconnected via a nationwide research network. The GENI mobile computing resource manager is based on the Orbit Management framework (OMF) [3] and provides seamless access to the edge computing resources via the GENI Portal for experimentation, scheduling, data collection and processing.