Principal Researcher
More about my research is available in the following MSR Luminaries interview, and article, and the recent Economist article. We recently published a paper describing our White Space Deployments in Africa.
Key projects:
IoT Applications: Leading research on the end-to-end design of IoT Applications, with an initial focus on Agriculture. Read the Economist article here.
Battery Research at Microsoft: Leading this effort since 2011. Shipped several innovations in products, such as Visual Studio and Windows. Two key research themes are: offload (MAUI, WearDrive, Somniloquy) and new battery architectures, e.g. Software Defined Batteries.
TV White Spaces: Started this project in 2005. Awarded MIT TR-35 Award for WhiteFi. Now working on worldwide deployments and policy.
Low Latency Wireless: Designed the XBOX One Wireless Controller Protocol. This is shipping on 10 million+ XBOXes,
VirtualWiFi: Ph.D. Thesis. This has led to the design of Wi-Fi Direct. Software has over half million downloads.
Bio:
Ranveer Chandra is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he is leading an Incubation on IoT Applications. His research has shipped as part of multiple Microsoft products, including VirtualWiFi in Windows 7 onwards, low power Wi-Fi in Windows 8, Energy Profiler in Visual Studio, and the Wireless Controller Protocol in XBOX One. He is active in the networking and systems research community, and has served as the Program Committee Chair of IEEE DySPAN 2012, and ACM MobiCom 2013.
Ranveer is leading the battery research project, and co-leading the white space networking project at Microsoft Research. He was invited to the FCC to present his work on TV white spaces, and spectrum regulators from India, China, Brazil, Singapore and US (including the FCC chairman) have visited the Microsoft campus to see his deployment of the world’s first urban white space network. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Ranveer developed VirtualWiFi. The software has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and is among the top 5 downloaded software released by Microsoft Research. It is shipping as a feature in Windows since 2009.
Ranveer has published more than 60 papers, and filed over 100 patents, more than 65 of which have been granted by the USPTO. His research has been cited by the popular press, such as CNET, MIT Technology Review, Scientific American, New York Times, WSJ, among others. He has won several awards, including best paper awards at ACM CoNext 2008, ACM SIGCOMM 2009, IEEE RTSS 2014, and USENIX ATC 2015, the Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship, the Microsoft Gold Star Award, the MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35, TR35 (2010) and Fellow in Communications, World Technology Network (2012). Ranveer has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur, India and a PhD from Cornell University.
For a more detailed CV, click here.
Established: April 14, 2016
Several studies have demonstrated the need for the world’s food production to double by 2050. However, there is limited amount of additional arable land, and water levels have also been receding. Although technology could help the farmer, its adoption is…
Established: May 28, 2015
The PinDrop project focuses on building the substrate for supporting high-quality real-time streaming over wired and wireless networks. Context Real-time streaming across the wide-area network (WAN) is key to several existing and anticipated services, including voice and video conferencing (e.g.,…
Established: November 30, 2012
The Spectrum Opportunity Microsoft is working with key partners around the world to ensure consumers have access to an increasing range of connected devices. To meet growing consumer demand and address other policy challenges, we must consider multiple approaches which…
Established: March 19, 2015
Mobile devices such as smartphones, along with other battery operated devices, are energy constrained. While hardware capabilities have increased tremendously over the last ten years, battery energy density has only doubled. In this project we are exploring several techniques to…
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August 7, 2014
Ranveer Chandra, Joshua Smith, Prabal Dutta, and Deepak Ganesan
MSR, University of Washington, University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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October 12, 2011
Ranveer Chandra
Microsoft Research
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April 21, 2005
Ranveer Chandra
Cornell
I have served on the Ph.D. committees of:
I have also worked with some very good interns:
I work closely with product teams within Microsoft. Some of the publically disclosed engagements are listed below.
XBOX One Wireless Controller Protocol (2013 to now)
The wireless protocol between the XBOX One controller and console
Designed the high-throughput, low-latency wireless protocol that shipped in the XBOX One. Research and industry has always focused on getting higher throughput. However, little prior work, if any, looks at achieving high throughput while achieving low (guaranteed) latency. For the XBOX One we designed a protocol that achieves both. I enjoyed being deeply involved with the design, development, and testing of the controllers.
Visual Studio 2013 Energy Profiler (2013) – Diagnostics & Performance Toolbox for Windows 8.1
Enables app developers to estimate the energy consumption of their apps
Described here, and also showcased in Steve Ballmer’s Build Keynote: (around 45th minute). Our research paper Empowering Developers to Estimate App Energy Consumption, published in ACM MobiCom 2012 describes the details of the system.
Low Energy Wi-Fi (2012) – Windows 8, Windows 10
Increases battery lifetime in Windows 8 Tablets and Surface computers.
Compared to laptops the new class of mobile devices, such as tablets and Surface computers, need to stay connected even when the screen is turned off. Keeping the Wi-Fi always on consumes significant energy. We designed a set of techniques that allows the Wi-Fi device to not lose its connection even when the screen is turned off and the processor (and SoC) is in a low power state. We accomplished this by reducing the Wi-Fi power consumption to a few mW in standby state. Our techniques shipped in Windows 8.
Antenna Placement on Windows Tablet (2012) – Windows 8.1
Enabled best-in-class Wi-Fi network connectivity & performance for tablets
We helped design the antenna placement on tablet devices. Since users hold tablets differently than laptops, existing antenna placement techniques (on the laptop’s screen) are not the most optimal for tablets. The placement of a user’s hand around the antenna might reduce the signal, and so can the orientation in which the tablet is held. We studied these phenomena in detail – in the wild and in antenna chambers – and made recommendations to the Windows 8 team, which were incorporated in the final design of Windows 8 tablets.
Visual Studio Energy Modeler & Profiler (2012) – Windows Phone 8 Dev Tools
Enables mobile app developers to estimate the energy consumption of their apps
Poorly written apps are one of the primary reasons for high energy drain on mobile devices. One reason for energy-inefficient apps is that app developers do not have sufficient tools to determine the energy impact of their apps. As part of a Wattson research project we designed a Visual Studio plug-in that provides visibility to the application developer of their application’s energy consumption. Our paper Empowering Developers to Estimate App Energy Consumption, published in ACM MobiCom 2012 describes the details of the system. This work formed the basis for the Energy Profiler that is part of the Visual Studio SDK for Windows Phone 8.
Singapore White Space Database (2012)
Used by Singapore’s regulatory authority in the Singapore White Space Trail
http://whitespaces.msresearch.us/Singapore/
White spaces profer to be a possible solution towards improving spectrum effiency. As part of our research since 2005, we developed a geo-location database service which returns a list of TV channels at any given location, and filed to be a white space database provider with the FCC. We are also working with governments outside the US with white space trials. We recently released a version of our database as part of the ongoing white spaces trial in Singapore.
Virtual Wi-Fi (2009) – Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10
Enables Windows to connect to multiple WLANs simultatenously. Is the foundation of SoftAP & Wi-Fi Direct features in Windows 7 & Windows 8
We designed a technique to virtualize wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. With it users can concurrently connect to multiple Wi-Fi networks using a single WLAN card, thus enabling several novel scenarios. The original paper. The original paper ( MultiNet: Connecting to Multiple IEEE 802.11 Networks Using a Single Wireless Card) was published in INFOCOM 2004. Our miniport driver was downloaded by over hundred thousand developers and was one of Microsoft Research’s most popular software downloads. Virtual Wi-Fi first shipped in Windows 7.
My research focuses on different aspects of mobile computing, in particular wireless communications and energy efficiency. Currently I am working on three different projects:
Video Links: An overview of my research is available in this MSR Luminaries Video. Some other video links are here: on white spaces, on improving battery life, and on code offload.
In the past I have worked on wireless management, mesh networks, enterprise network management, and different wireless architectures. More details about some of the projects are below.
We started the KNOWS project at Microsoft Research in early 2006, and since then I have led the technical aspects of the project through three versions. In the first phase, we looked at the MAC protocol for white spaces in a mesh setting. In the second phase, we proposed WhiteFi, a system for providing Wi-Fi like connectivity for white spaces. In the third phase, we have now built and deployed a white space network in Microsoft campus. More details on this project can be found here.
I am working on ways to reduce the energy consumption of PCs and mobile phones. Somniloquy (NSDI 2009) provides a way to let PCs go to sleep mode without losing network connectivity. Cell2Notify is a notification architecture for mobile phones that allows devices to turn on Wi-Fi only when needed, thereby increasing their battery lifetime. This is an active project, and expect to see more information soon.
With the increasing complexity of enterprise networks, there is a pressing need for efficient approaches to detect, localize, diagnose and repair faults in the network. I have worked on several aspects of network management as part of a bigger project, called NetHealth. Sherlock uses dependency analysis to localize faults that impact end-users, DAIR helps IT administrators locate regions of poor WLAN coverage and performance, and WiFiProfiler enables users to collaborately diagnose Wi-Fi problems.
“Whats Going On? Extracting Communication Rules in Edge Networks”, Srikanth Kandula, Ranveer Chandra, Dina Katabi. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Seattle, August 17-22, 2008
Smartphones are becoming extremely popular. While they provide a new and unique user experience, several key problems need to solve to fully realize their potential. First, RF spectrum is limited, and a proliferation of smartphones has led to significantly degraded performance. This is likely to become worse in the future. Second, battery technology is not evolving at the same pace as applications, and the energy-hungry applications on a smartphone quickly drain its battery. With these constraints in mind, I have been working on technologies and applications to make better use to the RF spectrum while consuming lesser energy.
I have worked on networking issues in layer 2 and layer 3 (both on unicast and multicast) in wireless mesh networks. The details of this project are available on our group’s Mesh Networking page.
Wi-Fi is designed as a convenient replacement for the wire, and its design mostly attempts to mimic the behavior of the Ethernet. For example, a Wi-Fi card needs to associate to an Access Point (AP) before it can send data packets, which is similar to the action to plugging the Ethernet cable in the wall. Furthermore, Wi-Fi restricts a card to associate to at most one AP. In my opinion, the wireless medium has a number of powerful properties and wireless networks should be treated differently from traditional wired networks. I have built some systems that try to break away from these constraints in Wi-Fi networks as part of VirtualWiFi and WiFiAds projects.