Internet Access Using Dense Self-Managing Wireless Networks

July 22, 2009
Peter Steenkiste | Carnegie Mellon University

Wireless networking is becoming the dominant technology for Internet access, resulting in a rapidly growing demand for wireless bandwidth. Meeting these demands requires new wireless techniques that make efficient use of the scarce unlicensed spectrum. In this talk, I will discuss four such techniques: channel aware rate adaptation (Charm), a protocol for opportunistic retransmission (PRO), transmit power and CCA threshold tuning, and the use of directional antennas. I will present the design, implementation, and evaluation of each technique and I will also discuss some common design principles that emerge and some of the fundamental differences between the techniques. Finally, I will briefly describe how we used the CMU wireless network emulator testbed in the evaluation and tuning of some of the protocols.

Speaker Details

Peter Steenkiste is a Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the degree of Electrical Engineer from the University of Gent in Belgium in 1982, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1983 and 1987, respectively.Peter Steenkiste’s research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed computing. While at CMU, Peter Steenkiste worked on Nectar, the first workstation clusters built around a high-performance, switch-based local area network. He contributed both to the optimization of the communication subsystem and to the development of programming tools for workstation clusters. The optimization of application-level communication performance over commodity networks was further explored in the Gigabit Nectar and Credit Net projects. All these projects developed prototype systems that were used by a wide range of application groups, allowing a realistic evaluation of the research.Peter Steenkiste’s current research is in the areas of wireless networking, distributed computing, and pervasive computing. The wireless landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. Not only have we seen a rapid growth in the use of wireless, but we are also seeing different types of deployments (e.g. unplanned and managed residential deployments in addition to traditional campus-style deployments) and more diversity in the technologies (e.g. Bluetooth, sensors, ..). Peter Steenkiste is involved in wireless projects in a number of areas, including self-management techniques for residential networks, emulation as a basis for evaluating wireless technologies, and the use of software radios as a platform for flexible, self-optimizing wireless protocols. In the area of distributed computing, he looking at Internet-scale network services that self-configure and self-optimize, i.e. they automatically adapt to changes in the network and load. Peter Steenkiste is also active in pervasive computing in the context of the CMU Aura project. The goal of Aura is to create a distraction-free pervasive computing environment that proactively helps users with daily tasks. In Aura, his research focus is on supporting adaptive and proactive applications, wireless networks, and device-rich spaces.Peter Steenkiste is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE. He has been on many program committees and he was co-chair for the OPENSIG’99 workshop and the “Eight International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS’00)”. He was also program chair for HPDC’2000 and general co-chair for ACM SIGCOMM’02. More recently, he was program co-chair for MobiCom 2008. He has been an associated editor for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (1998-1999), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (2000-2003), and Cluster Computing (2000-2004), and he is currently on the editorial board of the “Journal of Grid Computing”.