Matt Sanders

Usage-based dhcp lease time optimization

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is used to dynamically allocate address space to hosts on a local area network. Despite its widespread usage, few studies exist on DHCP usage patterns, and even less is known about the importance of setting the lease time (the time that a client retains ownership over some IP address) to an appropriate value. Lease time can greatly affect the tradeoff between address space utilization and the number of both renewal messages and client session expirations. In this paper, using a DHCP trace for 5 weekdays from the Georgia Tech campus network, we present the largest known study of DHCP utilization. We also explore how various strategies for setting lease times can dramatically reduce the number of renewals and expirations without prohibitively increasing address space utilization.

CANEs: an execution environment for composable services

Active networks represent a change in network paradigm from a static, one-size-fits-all packet-transport service to a flexible platform capable of being programmed to provide new services. Active networks will allow rapid deployment of new and complex network services. An important property of an active network API is the support it provides for composing complex services out of components. An efficient and robust composition mechanism is essential for incremental development of useful services. We describe the CANEs Active Networking Environment. CANEs is an EE (Execution Environment) specifically built for composing services within the network. We discuss the design philosophy behind CANEs, describe the formal model which the composition mechanism is based upon, and detail the current CANEs implementation.

GT Journey: The Importance of Accessible Rich Data Sources to Enable Innovation

GT Journey (gtjourney.gatech.edu) is an initiative, which empowers members of the Georgia Tech community to develop and deploy applications and services through access to resources (tools, data, services, space) and mentors with technical and domain expertise. The genesis for this initiative comes from a long history of facilitating application and service development for students by students in classroom and entrepreneurial settings. This paper reveals many of the lessons learned from this participatory design, build, and deploy initiative, which may be applicable to a variety of activities in educational, civic, and industry innovation settings.

The Convergence Innovation Competition: Helping Students Create Innovative Products and Experiences via Technical and Business Mentorship

The Convergence Innovation Competition is an annual event designed to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship among students from multiple disciplines and experience levels. The competition provides a unique model for engaging industrial partners to work with students through category definition, mentoring and judging. In this paper we describe the evolution of the program over the last eight years, lessons learned and new opportunities for engaging students in a meaningful learning experience.

The Evolution of the Argon Web Framework Through Its Use Creating Cultural Heritage and Community–Based Augmented Reality Applications

The Argon project was started to explore the creation of Augmented Reality applications with web technology. We have found this approach to be particularly useful for community-based applications. The Argon web browser has gone through two versions, informed by the work of our students and collaborators on these kinds of applications. In this paper, we highlight a number of the applications we and others have created, what we learned from them, and how our experiences creating these applications informed the design of Argon2 and the requirements for the next version, Argon3.

Midtown Buzz: Bridging the Gap Between Concepts and Impact in a Civic Computing Initiative

Midtown Buzz is a partnership between Georgia Tech and Midtown Alliance (MA), focusing on engaging urban communities through mobile innovation. Since 2013, we have been collaborating with the Midtown Atlanta community with the goal of transforming the area into an innovation district. This approach provided us with an opportunity to utilize Midtown as a living laboratory for civic computing research. During the two years of this project we have engaged in a participatory design process with diverse stakeholders to explore the needs of people in the Midtown area, and develop new technologies and approaches to address the identified needs. In this paper we discuss the lessons learned regarding the challenges of bridging the gap between concepts and deployable systems that can create positive transformation in a community.

MetroSDX: A resilient edge network for the smart community

Smart and connected communities and their associated edge devices are creating new demands on network services. Edge network connectivity is often not resilient to failures, leading to data loss when network devices are isolated by the failure of a single service provider, while other providers are still functional. We propose MetroSDX, a neutral network design that increases the resiliency of edge networks and global and local services, improves isolation of network functions, and preserves data from edge devices when they are disconnected. MetroSDX is a software-defined exchange, a meet-me point for exchanging computing, storage, and networking resources. This work focuses on MetroSDXs approach to location specific resilience and performance in this multi-network paradigm with an eye towards addressing increased demands from the growing set of connected devices and services which will increasingly and inevitably require communication between and across elements connected to multiple networks.

WhereAmI: A realworld testbed for location services

Location-based services are playing an increasingly important role in the rapidly evolving world of mobile applications. Despite this importance, there are numerous challenges to providing a widely implemented and usable service that spans multiple places, devices, and location technologies. This paper describes WhereAmI, a unique location services testbed that addresses these challenges and is enabling significant research and development of location-based applications and services.