Akash Baid

DMap: A Shared Hosting Scheme for Dynamic Identifier to Locator Mappings in the Global Internet

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a novel distributed shared hosting approach, DMap, for managing dynamic identifier to locator mappings in the global Internet. DMap is the foundation for a fast global name resolution service necessary to enable emerging Internet services such as seamless mobility support, content delivery and cloud computing. Our approach distributes identifier to locator mappings among Autonomous Systems (ASs) by directly applying K>;1 consistent hash functions on the identifier to produce network addresses of the AS gateway routers at which the mapping will be stored. This direct mapping technique leverages the reachability information of the underlying routing mechanism that is already available at the network layer, and achieves low lookup latencies through a single overlay hop without additional maintenance overheads. The proposed DMap technique is described in detail and specific design problems such as address space fragmentation, reducing latency through replication, taking advantage of spatial locality, as well as coping with inconsistent entries are addressed. Evaluation results are presented from a large-scale discrete event simulation of the Internet with ~26,000 ASs using real-world traffic traces from the DIMES repository. The results show that the proposed method evenly balances storage load across the global network while achieving lookup latencies with a mean value of ~50 ms and 95th percentile value of ~100 ms, considered adequate for support of dynamic mobility across the global Internet.

Distinguishing users with capacitive touch communication

As we are surrounded by an ever-larger variety of post-PC devices, the traditional methods for identifying and authenticating users have become cumbersome and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a capacitive communication method through which a device can recognize who is interacting with it. This method exploits the capacitive touchscreens, which are now used in laptops, phones, and tablets, as a signal receiver. The signal that identifies the user can be generated by a small transmitter embedded into a ring, watch, or other artifact carried on the human body. We explore two example system designs with a low-power continuous transmitter that communicates through the skin and a signet ring that needs to be touched to the screen. Experiments with our prototype transmitter and tablet receiver show that capacitive communication through a touchscreen is possible, even without hardware or firmware modifications on a receiver. This latter approach imposes severe limits on the data rate, but the rate is sufficient for differentiating users in multiplayer tablet games or parental control applications. Controlled experiments with a signal generator also indicate that future designs may be able to achieve datarates that are useful for providing less obtrusive authentication with similar assurance as PIN codes or swipe patterns commonly used on smartphones today.

Understanding channel selection dynamics in dense Wi-Fi networks

This paper aims to explain and analyze a growing problem in dense-urban wireless networks, that of co-existence between low-cost residential access points (APs) and actively-managed service provider APs in overlapping spatial, frequency, and time domains. Through detailed simulations and testbed experiments, the impact of increasing density of highly-adaptive service provider APs on the performance of typical residential APs is measured in terms of their respective channel assignment schemes. Simulation results with dense deployment of up to 500 APs/sq.km. show the benefits of centralized channel assignments, even in the presence of independent APs. In addition, it is shown that for a fixed AP density, an increase in the percentage of AP under the centralized scheme results in an increase in the throughput of surrounding independent APs. The broader implications of the simulation findings are discussed in order to develop a better macro-level understanding of dense Wi-Fi networks.

Performance evaluation of mobile hotspots in densely deployed WLAN environments

This paper presents a study of mobile wireless LAN (WLAN) hotspots which are used to provide cellular-WiFi tethering service to personal devices. A dense deployment scenario for fixed and mobile WLAN is described and potential performance problems due to interference are identified. An analytical model for coexisting fixed and mobile WLAN hotspots with heterogeneous traffic is presented. The model is used to evaluate the performance of a mobile WLAN as it transits through a set of densely deployed fixed access points (APs), and performance problems due to lack of frequency coordination are identified. An adaptive channel assignment (ACA) scheme for improving mobile AP performance is proposed and evaluated. It is shown that significant performance gains can be achieved with ACA with maximum absolute and percentage throughput gains up to 1.24 Mbps and 42.8% respectively. We also show that setting the scanning interval in ACA requires consideration of the speed at which the mobile WLAN is moving in order to compensate for the throughput losses during channel scanning.

Spectrum MRI: Towards diagnosis of multi-radio interference in the unlicensed band

The increasing density and data rate of unlicensed band wireless devices in small office and home (SOHO) environments has led to significant inter- and intra-radio interference problems. Multiple competing standards such as the IEEE 802.11b/g, Bluetooth and ZigBee, all of which operate in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, can interfere with each other when used in typical indoor environments, potentially causing significant performance degradation. This paper presents detailed experimental results (using the ORBIT radio grid testbed) to quantify the effects of such interference in representative SOHO scenarios. In particular, different topologies, traffic loads and number of interfering devices are emulated to show the impact of multi-radio interference and to characterize each kind of interference. Further, a cross-layer, multi-radio interference diagnosis framework (called “spectrum MRI”) is described with the aim of isolating and classifying multi-radio interference problems using heuristic and model-based methods. A specific example of identifying interference problems which may affect an 802.11g video link is given to illustrate the proposed measurement and diagnosis framework.

Enabling vehicular networking in the MobilityFirst future internet architecture

Vehicular networking, both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), is an increasingly important usage scenario for future mobile Internet services. Radio technologies such as 3G/4G and WAVE/802.11p now enable vehicles to communicate with each other and connect to the Internet, but there is still the lack of a unifying network protocol architecture for delivery of services across both V2V and V2I modes. The MobilityFirst future Internet architecture, discussed in this paper, is a clean-slate protocol design in which the requirements of untethered nodes and dynamically formed networks are considered from the ground-up, making it particularly suitable for vehicular applications. Here we describe the vehicular networking specific features and protocol design details of the architecture and present evaluation results on performance and scalability.

Measurment and analysis on QoS of wireless LAN densely deployed with transmission rate control

This paper investigates Quality of Service (QoS) of the personal mobile wireless LANs (m-WLANs). The situations in the m-WLANs differs from the situations in the normal use of WLANs; the access point (AP) and the associated terminals (TEs) are in proximity. In the m-WLANs, the capture effect (CE) significantly affects on the throughput performance. To measure the impact on the QoS by the CE, the experimental study considering the interference from other power sources (APs and TEs) are required. However, since it is difficult to understand the detailed relationships between the QoS factors, the analytical calculations were also performed. With the experimental and analytical results, we demonstrated that the auto rate fallback algorithm of WLAN causes degradation of the QoS performance. We propose two transmission rates controlling schemes to improve the QoS performance.

Network-assisted multihoming for emerging heterogeneous wireless access scenarios

This paper presents a technique for enabling multihoming in the emerging heterogeneous (“hetnet”) mobile wireless access scenarios, where mobile devices have dual wireless interfaces (such as Wi-Fi and LTE) and can use either or both to achieve significant improvements in performance and service quality. A novel network-assisted technique for multihoming is introduced, enabled by the globally unique identifier (GUID) based routing in the proposed MobilityFirst Future Internet architecture, now under development. In particular, the approach shifts the burden of policy expression and data-striping from end-nodes to in-network nodes, and utilizes named object routing with GUIDs to establish multiple paths to destination mobile devices. The proposed multihoming technique uses hop-by-hop backpressure for data striping at the bifurcation router and includes a robust mechanism to reduce reordering of packets at the receive buffer. We quantify the performance gains using detailed NS3 based simulations and present results from a thorough parametric study to determine the effects of datarate, delay and hop-count difference between multiple available paths. We also show that when multiple interfaces are available, simultaneous use of both the interfaces is beneficial only under certain conditions depending on the ratio of the data-rate of the interfaces and the size of the flow.

Capacitive Touch Communication: A Technique to Input Data through Devices' Touch Screen

As we are surrounded by an ever-larger variety of post-PC devices, the traditional methods for identifying and authenticating users have become cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we present a capacitive communication method through which a device can recognize who is interacting with it. This method exploits the capacitive touchscreens, which are now used in laptops, phones, and tablets, as a signal receiver. The signal that identifies the user can be generated by a small transmitter embedded into a ring, watch, or other artifact carried on the human body. We explore two example system designs with a low-power continuous transmitter that communicates through the skin and a signet ring that needs to be touched to the screen. Experiments with our prototype transmitter and tablet receiver show that capacitive communication through a touchscreen is possible, even without hardware or firmware modifications on a receiver. This latter approach imposes severe limits on the data rate, but the rate is sufficient for differentiating users in multiplayer tablet games or parental control applications. Controlled experiments with a signal generator also indicate that future designs may be able to achieve data rates that are useful for providing less obtrusive authentication with similar assurance as PIN codes or swipe patterns commonly used on smartphones today.

Wireless access considerations for the MobilityFirst future Internet architecture

This paper presents an overview of wireless access considerations behind the design of the MobilityFirst clean-slate future Internet architecture. The MobilityFirst architecture is motivated by a historic shift of the Internet from the fixed host-server model to one in which access from mobile platforms becomes the norm. This implies the need for a future Internet architecture designed to handle the special needs of mobile/wireless access efficiently and at large scale. A number of key wireless access network requirements including user/network mobility, varying wireless link quality and disconnection, multi-homing, ad hoc networking, flexible autonomous system boundaries and spectrum coordination are identified along with a brief discussion of the implications for protocol design. This is followed by a summary of the MobilityFirst protocol stack based on separation of names and locators, global name resolution service (GNRS), storage-aware routing with hop-by-hop transport, integrated spectrum management, along with an enhanced edge-aware interdomain routing framework. Selected results from ongoing protocol design and evaluation work are given for key components such as the GNRS, storage-aware routing and spectrum coordination protocol.