Srihari Nelakuditi

Proactive vs reactive approaches to failure resilient routing

Dealing with network failures effectively is a major operational challenge for Internet service providers. Commonly deployed link state routing protocols such as OSPF react to link failures through global (i.e., network-wide) link state advertisements and routing table recomputations, causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. The drawback with these protocols is that they need to trade off routing stability and forwarding continuity. To improve failure resiliency without jeopardizing routing stability, we propose a proactive local rerouting based approach called failure insensitive routing (FIR). The proposed approach prepares for failures using interface-specific forwarding, and upon a failure, suppresses the link state advertisement and instead triggers local rerouting using a backwarding table. In this paper, we prove that when no more than one link failure notification is suppressed, FIR always finds a loop-free path to a destination if one such path exists. We also formally analyze routing stability and network availability under both proactive and reactive approaches, and show that FIR provides better stability and availability than OSPF.

Fast local rerouting for handling transient link failures

Link failures are part of the day-to-day operation of a network due to many causes such as maintenance, faulty interfaces, and accidental fiber cuts. Commonly deployed link state routing protocols such as OSPF react to link failures through global link state advertisements and routing table recomputations causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. Careful tuning of various parameters to accelerate routing convergence may cause instability when the majority of failures are transient. To enhance failure resiliency without jeopardizing routing stability, we propose a local rerouting based approach called failure insensitive routing. The proposed approach prepares for failures using interface-specific forwarding, and upon a failure, suppresses the link state advertisement and instead triggers local rerouting using a backwarding table. With this approach, when no more than one link failure notification is suppressed, a packet is guaranteed to be forwarded along a loop-free path to its destination if such a path exists. This paper demonstrates the feasibility, reliability, and stability of our approach.

No time to countdown: migrating backoff to the frequency domain

Conventional WiFi networks perform channel contention in time domain. This is known to be wasteful because the channel is forced to remain idle while all contending nodes are backing off for multiple time slots. This paper proposes to break away from convention and recreate the backing off operation in the frequency domain. Our basic idea leverages the observation that OFDM subcarriers can be treated as integer numbers. Thus, instead of picking a random backoff duration in time, a contending node can signal on a randomly chosen subcarrier. By employing a second antenna to listen to all the subcarriers, each node can determine whether its chosen integer (or subcarrier) is the smallest among all others. In fact, each node can even determine the rank of its chosen subcarrier, enabling the feasibility of scheduled transmissions after every round of contention. We develop these ideas into a Back2F protocol that migrates WiFi backoff to the frequency domain. Experiments on a prototype of 10 USRPs confirm feasibility, along with consistent throughput gains over 802.11. at high bit rates. Trace based simulations affirm scalability to larger, real-world network topologies.

On the Efficacy of Opportunistic Routing

Traditional routing schemes select the best path for each destination and forward a packet to the corresponding next hop. While such best-path routing schemes are considered well-suited for networks with reliable point-to-point links, they are not necessarily ideal for wireless networks with lossy broadcast links. Consequently, opportunistic routing schemes that exploit the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions and dynamically select a next-hop per-packet based on loss conditions at that instant are being actively explored. It is generally accepted that opportunistic routing performs substantially better than best-path routing for wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we analyze the efficacy of opportunistic routing. We define a new metric EAX that captures the expected number of any-path transmissions needed to successfully deliver a packet between two nodes under opportunistic routing. Based on EAX, we develop a candidate selection and prioritization method corresponding to an ideal opportunistic routing scheme. We then conduct an off-line comparison of best-path routing and opportunistic routing using our EAX metric and MIT Roofnet trace. We observe that while opportunistic routing offers better performance than best- path routing, the gain is not as high as commonly believed.

Routing with opportunistically coded exchanges in wireless mesh networks

Network coding is known to improve network throughput by mixing information from different flows and conveying more information in each transmission. Recently there have been some proposals for applying network coding to wireless mesh networks leveraging the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions. These approaches exploit coding opportunities passively while forwarding packets but they do not proactively change routing of flows to create more coding opportunities. In this paper, we attempt to investigate the extent of performance gain possible when routing decisions are made with the awareness of coding. We first define the expected number of coded transmissions for a successful exchange of packets between two nodes through an intermediate node. We then formulate optimal routing with coding, given the topology and traffic, as a linear programming problem. We conduct a preliminary evaluation of coding-aware routing and show that it offers significant gain particularly when there are many long distance flows.

On selection of candidates for opportunistic anypath forwarding

Opportunistic routing schemes that exploit the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions for selecting the best next-hop at that instant among a set of candidates are being actively explored [1-3]. These schemes which we refer to as opportunistic any-path forwarding (OAPF), reduce the number of transmissions needed for reliable packet delivery.

CSMA/CN: carrier sense multiple access with collision notification

A wireless transmitter learns of a packet loss and infers collision only after completing the entire transmission. If the transmitter could detect the collision early [such as with carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) in wired networks], it could immediately abort its transmission, freeing the channel for useful communication. There are two main hurdles to realize CSMA/CD in wireless networks. First, a wireless transmitter cannot simultaneously transmit and listen for a collision. Second, any channel activity around the transmitter may not be an indicator of collision at the receiver. This paper attempts to approximate CSMA/CD in wireless networks with a novel scheme called CSMA/CN (collision notification). Under CSMA/CN, the receiver uses PHY-layer information to detect a collision and immediately notifies the transmitter. The collision notification consists of a unique signature, sent on the same channel as the data. The transmitter employs a listener antenna and performs signature correlation to discern this notification. Once discerned, the transmitter immediately aborts the transmission. We show that the notification signature can be reliably detected at the listener antenna, even in the presence of a strong self-interference from the transmit antenna. A prototype testbed of 10 USRP/GNU Radios demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of CSMA/CN.

SpinLoc: spin once to know your location

The rapid growth of location-based applications has spurred extensive research on localization. Nonetheless, indoor localization remains an elusive problem mostly because the accurate techniques come at the expense of cumbersome war-driving or additional infrastructure. Towards a solution that is easier to adopt, we propose SpinLoc that is free from these requirements. Instead, SpinLoc levies a little bit of the localization burden on the humans, expecting them to rotate around once to estimate their locations. Our main observation is that wireless signals attenuate differently, based on how the human body is blocking the signal. We find that this attenuation can reveal the directions of the APs in indoor environments, ultimately leading to localization. This paper studies the feasibility of SpinLoc in real-world indoor environments using off-the-shelf WiFi hardware. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates accuracies comparable toschemes that rely on expensive war-driving.

TagSense: a smartphone-based approach to automatic image tagging

Mobile phones are becoming the convergent platform for personal sensing, computing, and communication. This paper attempts to exploit this convergence towards the problem of automatic image tagging. We envision TagSense, a mobile phone based collaborative system that senses the people, activity, and context in a picture, and merges them carefully to create tags on-the-fly. The main challenge pertains to discriminating phone users that are in the picture from those that are not. We deploy a prototype of TagSense on 8 Android phones, and demonstrate its effectiveness through 200 pictures, taken in various social settings. While research in face recognition continues to improve image tagging, TagSense is an attempt to embrace additional dimensions of sensing towards this end goal. Performance comparison with Apple iPhoto and Google Picasa shows that such an out-of-band approach is valuable, especially with increasing device density and greater sophistication in sensing/learning algorithms.

Failure inferencing based fast rerouting for handling transient link and node failures

With the emergence of voice over IP and other real-time business applications, there is a growing demand for an IP network with high service availability. Unfortunately, in todays Internet, transient failures occur frequently due to faulty interfaces, router crashes, etc., and current IP networks lack the resiliency needed to provide high availability. To enhance availability, we proposed failure inferencing based fast rerouting (FIFR) approach that exploits the existence of a forwarding table per line-card, for lookup efficiency in current routers, to provide fast rerouting similar to MPLS, while adhering to the destination-based forwarding paradigm. In our previous work, we have shown that the FIFR approach can deal with single link failures. In this paper, we extend the FIFR approach to ensure loop-free packet delivery in case of single router failures also, thus mitigating the impact of many scenarios of failures. We demonstrate that the proposed approach not only provides high service availability but also incurs minimal routing overhead.