[Colloq] Thesis Defense - Tao Jin - Open Networking Infrastructure: Boosting Wireless Networks in the Era of Cloud - March 7 - 5:30pm - 366WVH

[Jessica Biron]

Thesis Defense by Tao Jin 
Date/Time: Thursday March 7th, 2013 at 5:30pm 
Location: 366 WVH 

Thesis title: Open Networking Infrastructure: Boosting Wireless Networks in the Era of Cloud 

Abstract: 

In recent years, the mobile Internet underwent revolutionary changes, resulting in end users' unprecedented demand of ubiquitous network access. My research focuses on how to leverage the densely deployed urban WiFi to form a community infrastructure that provides a truly scalable, efficient and ubiquitous access to wireless and data. 

In this work, we propose an Open Infrastructure framework. To evaluate the feasibility of our research ideas, we have built and deployed an Open Infrastructure testbed, consisting of 30 customized home WiFi APs running in the urban areas of Boston and Houston. With an extensive set of experiments, including over 70 million residential network usage statistics and 1.3TB of traffic trace, we are able to characterize the urban WiFi resources provisioning and justify the practicability of such framework. 

Motivated by our observation, our research focuses on two domains, urban WiFi assisted energy saving on mobile devices and idle bandwidth harvesting from home WiFi APs. We have initiated two projects, WiZi-Cloud and BaPu, to develop a set of enabling mechanism and prototypes to demonstrate the feasibility of our ideas. 

In WiZi-Cloud, we extend the current WiFi AP and mobile device with an alternative ultra-low power ZigBee radio interface, to reduce the battery consumption on the energy constrained mobile devices. We design and prototype a complete suite of hardware/software solution. WiZi-Cloud well supports a large set of mainstream mobile applications and improves the energy efficiency by 3 folds and can exceed WiFi coverage range. 

BaPu is motivated by the fact that today's residential broadband connections have limited backhaul bandwidth, especially in uplink, which highly constrains many fastly growing applications, such as HD content instant sharing, efficient cloud storage backup, etc. In BaPu, we design the mechanisms of aggregating the idle broadband uplinks, by having the mobile device communicate with multiple proximate WiFi APs in the same neighbourhood. We propose a novel mechanism, Proactive-ACK, to enable high bandwidth aggregation performance for both TCP and UDP. BaPu can efficiently aggregate the backhaul bandwidth of multiple access points and achieves up to 90% of the theoretical maximum throughput. 

Thesis Committee: 
Guevara Noubir (Advisor) 
Alan Mislove 
Rajmohan Rajaraman 
Prasant Mohapatra (External Member, University of California, Davis) 

Jessica Biron 
Administrative Assistant – Office of the Dean and CCIS Development 
College of Computer and Information Science 
Northeastern University 
202 West Village H 
617-373-5204 
bironje at ccis.neu.edu 
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/