[Colloq] Jakob Eriksson Today

[Patricia Freeman]

Jakob Eriksson's Hiring Talk will take place at 12pm TODAY in 108WVH

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2008
WiFi on the Road : Real-World Performance and Applications
Speaker: Jakob Eriksson
Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 
Talk: 12:00 p.m., 108 WVH

Abstract

Open WiFi connectivity is widely available today, even, or perhaps particularly, to moving vehicles. However, our experiments with 25 taxis in the Boston area have shown that encounters with such access points tend to be brief, on the order of 5-10 seconds, and signal quality tends to be poor, experiencing 30% packet losses on average. In the first part of my talk, I will present the QuickWiFi connection manager and the CarTel transport protocol, both designed to withstand these adverse conditions. Using these, we are able to achieve an averaged throughput of 38 Mb/hour, or 80kbit/s, from moving vehicles. 
This free, high-capacity vehicular connectivity enables a wide range of new applications, including various forms of mobile sensing and in- car media. One application of particular interest to the CarTel group is traffic congestion monitoring. In the second part of my talk, I will describe a system for WiFi-based street-by-street vehicle trajectory estimation. By using WiFi for both sensing and connectivity, it is possible to turn any WiFi-enabled device into a 'traffic congestion probe'. Deployed in large scale, this enables an extremely low-cost method of measuring street congestion levels, city- wide.

Brief Biography

Jakob Eriksson is a postdoctoral associate in the CarTel group at MIT CSAIL. He received his Ph.D. from UC Riverside in 2006. Before that, he graduated with an M.Sc. from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests include vehicular networking and mobile sensing, routing and security in wired and wireless networks.