Mario Gerla - US grants

The area of high speed fiber optic local area networks is increasing in relevance and in interest. Particularly large capacity networks will be needed for such things as interactive high-speed graphics, real time video, large file transfer as well as an intergration of many of these diverse communications process. The proposed effort will bring together numerous expects to study and implement some of the advanced configurations and devices needed in order for such networks to become viable. Particularly for reaching aspects of proposed effort are the devices required and the inavailability of interfaces the new between stations and the network itself.

This award supports cooperative research in computer systems to be conducted by Richard Muntz and Mario Gerla of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) together with Prof. Edmundo de Souza e Silva at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Prof. Roberto Boisson de Marca of the Catholic University, also in Rio. They will develop an environment for modeling and performance/reliability analysis of distributed computer communication systems. The goal is to give the analyst the ability to test new ideas, incoporate new techniques and build interfaces tailored to particular application areas. New solution methods will be developed to be incorporated into the environment. State-of-the-art solution techniques will be implemented as well. Analytic studies of distributed system problems will be performed using the new environment which will help guide its design in addition to having their own independent interest. The two universities in Rio are currently building a Laboratory for the Study of Distributed Systems. It will incorporate powerful work stations linked by a local area network. At UCLA a large project is underway to develop modeling environments. Theoretical modeling developed in the U.S. will show directions to be followed in Brazil in building tools to perform modeling and analysis so that this cooperative effort will combine the complementary work of two active and productive groups and be beneficial to both. Software development efforts will be carried out in both countries, libraries of objects and analytical solvers will be be built up and there are plans to advise Ph.D. students from both Brazil and the U.S.

This award will support Professor Mario Gerla of the University of California at Los Angeles in a research collaboration with Professor Luigi Fratta of the Politechnical University, Milan, Italy. The proposers intend to focus on the design of high speed networks. The advances in fiber optics, signal processing and switching technologies, the proliferation of microcomputers and workstations and the increasing sophistica- tion of the end user offer new opportunities for the introduction of enhanced communications services to business and residences. The following main directions of research are proposed: design and evaluation of Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architectures; performance evaluation and topology configuration of Broadband ISDNs; interconnection of LANs, MANs and B-ISDNs. Novel metropolitan network architectures based on tree topologies and wavelength division multiplexing will be investigated, with the goal of achieving much higher speeds (in the Gigabit range) than available from existing MAN products. Network control and management techniques for high speed, wide area networks will be developed to guarantee efficiency and to prevent congestion.

9305376 Gerla This project involves the problem of supporting connectionless service in an ATM network. The urgency of this problem stems from the need to interconnect LANs and MANs (typically, operated in a connectionless mode) to the connection oriented ATM. The problem is quite challenging because the ATM network requires that users set up connections and declare in advance the expected traffic on each connection. The network then uses this information to allocate bandwidth to individual users. Connectionless sources, on the other hand, are by their nature unpredictable, thus eluding the ATM bandwidth allocation strategy, and potentially compromising network efficiency. In this project, a scheme - the Connectionless Server (CLS) overlay network - is investigated. This scheme permits efficient handling of connectionless traffic in ATM. Various design options (topology connectivity, bandwidth allocation, buffer management, etc.) are examined, and performance models and criteria for their selection are developed. The CLS scheme will be compared with other connectionless support schemes (Bandwidth Reservation and On-the-Fly Transmission) and the respective pros and cons will be evaluated. Finally, a hybrid scheme combining features of al of the schemes will be examined in an attempt to combine their benefits while avoiding their pitfalls. ***

9303148 Kleinrock This award provides support for the investigation of collective behavior of a collection of autonomous, communicating mobile robots (mobots). Ths study will be accomplished through the establishment of a laboratory to study distributed robotics involving researchers form computer science, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. The award also provides support for the acquisition of mobots and for the support of technical staff to maintain the laboratory. The main research topic pursued is distributed algorithms for collective behavior. The specific topics to be pursued are communication improvements and protocols for wireless communication between improvements and protocols for wireless communication between robots, distributed motion planning studies for the robots, and the application of maximum utility theory to the implementation of collective behavior.

The ATM network offers various types of services, with different levels of QoS guarantees. Two services which are gaining increasing importance are ABR (Available Bit Rate) and UBR (Undeclared Bit Rate). ABR and UBR are services of lesser quality than CBR (Constant Bit Rate) and VBR (Variable Bit Rate) in that they can use only the residual trunk bandwidth (left over by VBR and CBR). Since bandwidth is not reserved in advance (except for an optional Min Cell Rate, MCR), the network must protect itself from congestion caused by excess ABR and UBR input traffic. In UBR, excess traffic is simply discarded at overloaded nodes. In ABR, the network prevents congestion using a feedback control mechanism. Namely, the input rate of each ABR source is regulated so as to match the available bandwidth on the path. The main focus of this research will be the feedback rate control mechanism, called E-PRCA (Enhanced Proportional Rate Control Algorithm) and its properties and applications.

E-PRCA has been implemented in many versions. Most implementations converge to steady state and provide fair bandwidth sharing among competing ABR connections. However, few implementations prevent, or at least bound cell loss. Often, this cell loss problem is overlooked since ABR is "a best effort service" and thus the customer was not promised cell loss guarantees. However, a closer look reveals that it is beneficial to limit and if possible prevent ABR cell loss because: (a) Higher layer protocols, such as TCP, are impacted by cell loss; (b) In multicast connections, loss recovery at the application level is costly; and (c) ABR is becoming an attractive alternative (to VBR) for multimedia applications which tolerate adaptive rate regulation.

In this project, we propose four tasks:

ABR control with cell loss prevention/bounds: Starting point will be the SP-EPRCA scheme, a rate control scheme based on Smith Predictor and developed by this Investigator and his collaborator. Preliminary properties of cell loss prevention and bounds were already established for SP-EPRCA. We plan to explore the feasibility of cell loss bounds in other popular ABR rate control schemes (e.g., ERICA). We will evaluate the performance of various implementations (via analysis and simulations), deriving tradeoffs between key parameters (buffer allocation, throughput, stability, fairness, responsiveness, etc) for various network and traffic scenarios. Implementation complexity will also be evaluated.

ABR multicast : We plan to extend the E-PRCA control to multicast connections. Again, starting point will be an implementation recently proposed for SP-EPRCA. The main focus will be cell loss prevention, which is critical here since data multicast applications are not protected by TCP error and loss recovery.

ABR connection routing: We will attack the problem of optimally routing ABR connections subject to rate control with cell loss bound. Cell loss bounds make this problem more complex than merely finding the shortest path route with desired fair share bandwidth. We will explore both unicast and multicast routing, relying on efficient heuristics for the latter.

Applications: We will evaluate the benefits of ABR cell loss prevention and routing in several applications including TCP/IP support. We will also compare the efficiency of ABR vs UBR or VBR as appropriate.

In this study the researchers consider a large population of mobile stations which are interconnected by a multihop wireless net. The applications of this wireless infrastructure range from ad hoc networking (eg, collaborative, distributed computing) to disaster recovery (fire, flood, earthquake), law enforcement (eg, crowd control), search and rescue and battlefield. Key characteristics of this system are the large number of users, their mobility and the ability to operate without the support of a fixed (wired or wireless) infrastructure. The last feature sets this system apart from existing cellular systems and in fact makes its design much more challenging.

In this environment, the researchers propose to develop routing and multicast strategies which scale well to a large number of nodes and which can handle mobility. The combination of large number and mobility makes the problem very hard. In fact, large networks can be effectively handled with hierarchical routing, if nodes are stationary. When nodes move, the hierarchical partitioning must be dynamically changed - a significant challenge. Mobile IP solutions work well when there is a fixed infrastructure supporting the concept of fixed "Home Agent". When all nodes move, the Home Agent strategy is less obvious. In addition to large number and mobility, we address also the need to support multimedia communications, with low latency requirements for
interactive traffic and QoS support for real time streams (voice/video).

In the wireless routing area, several schemes have already been proposed and implemented (eg, hierarchical routing, on-demand routing etc). The researchers will discuss the pro's and con's of the existing schemes, and will introduce two new schemes - hierarchical, mobile routing and Fisheye routing - which overcome some of the limitations of the existing schemes. In the wireless multicast area, we review the traditional schemes used in wireline networks (eg, Source Trees, Core Based Tree, etc) and show how they perform poorly in highly mobile networks. We then introduce a new concept, Forwarding Group Multicast, in which the Tree is replaced by a mesh of Forwarding Nodes - the latter being much easier to maintain than the tree in the face of mobility. The researchers propose to extend the on-demand routing strategy to such structure to handle large scale.

A planning grant is requested to establish a multi-disciplinary effort at UCLA to apply wireless, mobile networking to support seamless transition of applications across heterogeneous clients for patient record retrieval in medical settings. The planning grant will be used to establish a very small testbed with heterogeneous devices that include desktop computers, laptops, and hand held devices, to provide an environment in which to deploy an early prototype of the proposed system. The testbed will also allow us to enhance interactions among the researchers from different disciplines and the campus telecommunications facility to prepare for an eventual full throttled deployment of the system. Lastly, the small physical testbed will allow us to cleanly separate the advanced development concerns from the more research-oriented issues such that we can deploy the system using state of the art COTS tools while simultaneously pursuing research ideas to influence the next generation of the proposed environment.

This award provides funding for two years of work focused on the measurement and analysis of network performance from the perspective of endpoint applications. To date, much of the high performance network measurement activity has focused on the core network and its potential. This work will help to develop understanding about the additional problems faced in marrying campus infrastructures and LAN infrastructures to a high speed backbone. Building on prior work with tools such as OCXmon, Coral, SNMP, and others, the research will utilize experiments customized to high speed applications and will incorporate the data collection, postprocessing, and eventual opportunity for network feedback to applications for purposes of adaptivity or monitoring. One additional emphasis will be to work with those engaged in developing new generations of network-based applications in order to factor in their requirements and to verify the measurement results.

The researchers envision that within the next few years mobile and wireless access to the Internet will very likely become the norm, rather than the exception as is seen today. This proposal describes the plans to develop and deploy iMASH, a network system that supports anytime, anywhere, on any platform access to the electronic patient records database for healthcare providers. The objective is to provide the capability for real-time, multimedia communication, so that a physician may access, on the move, the patients record and other relevant information as filtered by the physician's user profile, and may migrate ongoing application sessions seamlessly to different platforms that range from a high performance diagnostic workstation in the physician's office to hand held PDAs in the examination room. While the proposed techniques are general and extend to a range of mobile applications, the specific target of this project is healthcare applications. To this end, the researchers will develop a clinical testbed, which will serve as a laboratory for developing, testing, and evaluating advanced information technology in the context of patient care. The testbed will provide the user requirements to drive the iMASH architecture design, and will permit direct, realistic validation of the research results.
The researchers expect to make the following contributions from this research and development effort:
1) Development of a middleware infrastructure that provides support for anytime, anywhere, on any platform access to the Internet
2) A suite of wireless networking protocols and algorithms that provide quality of service support in a mobile, heterogeneous networking environment
3) A deployment of iMASH within the UCLA Medial School and a controlled study to evaluate its effectiveness in reducing healthcare costs and improving physician effectiveness
4) A system emulation capability that can be used to evaluate the performance and scalability of the middleware services and protocols across multiple dimensions including number of users, number of devices, types of applications, and geographical area. The emulator will be used to 'test drive' novel protocols and applications prior to deployment on the physical testbed.
The researchers have assembled a strong research and development team to undertake the iMASH effort. The team possesses the necessary expertise in the related areas of networking (Zhang, Gerla), wireless communications (Gerla, Lu), parallel and distributed systems (Bagrodia, Gerla), performance evaluation (Bagrodia), computerized medicine (Valentino, McCoy), clinical evaluation of technological innovations in improving heath care (Fiske), and campus computing and communication technology (Solomon).
A longer term goal of this effort is to deploy iMASH-like technology widely within the UCLA campus to support ubiquitous multimedia access for students and faculty, and to support wireless distance education. To enable appropriate technology transition, the team also includes two key members from the university administration: the CIO for the medical school (McCoy) and the Associate Vice-chancellor of Administrative Services with line responsibility over campus telecommunications (Solomon). The UCLA Hospital has recently embarked on a historical reconstruction with a $1 billion endowment. An integral part of the reconstruction is availability of complete wireless connectivity within the hospital. The UCLA campus is also engaged in a project to upgrade the network connectivity throughout the campus with the aim of providing a minimum of 10Mbps bandwidth from desktop to desktop within any two locations on campus. Planning is underway to further enhance this capability with wireless connectivity. These two technology initiatives provide a unique opportunity to insert the iMASH technology in widespread use within the UCLA campus, and subsequently to other locations.

The Next Generation Internet (NGI) poses scalability challenges to the efficient operation of
the transport protocol (TCP). In particular, as the product (bandwidth x delay) grows, the
congestion window required to .fill the pipe. becomes quite large, especially on cross-country
links. One well known problem in TCP in this scenario is the selection of the .initial
window.. More recently, new challenges have emerged because of the increasing popularity
of nomadic access to the Internet via wireless links (e.g., wireless LANs, satellite links,
UMTS, etc). The data rates on wireless links have been constantly on the rise, approaching
the 50Mbps on 802.11a wireless LANs and thus providing an effective extension of backbone
services to mobile users. However, wireless links tend to introduce random packet errors and
loss that are not correlated to congestion. This creates problems to conventional TCP
protocols (e.g., TCP New Reno and TCP SACK), which interpret any loss as a buffer overflow
(i.e., as a symptom of congestion) and thus reduce the congestion window unnecessarily with
consequent loss in performance. The drop in performance is proportional to the (bandwidth x
length) product of the connection and can be quite significant in the high bandwidth NGI
environment, especially on cross country paths including .last hop wireless LANs, UMTS
links, or high bandwidth satellites.
Several approaches to enhance TCP congestion control over high bandwidth wireless links
have been reported in the literature (e.g., TCP Peach, TCP Westwood (TCPW)). Some of
these enhancements have been quite successful. For example, TCPW, a TCP variant that
uses bottleneck bandwidth share estimation. to adjust the congestion window upon loss, has
shown scalable properties and good link utilization in large leaky pipes., (i.e. large
bandwidth delay product, and non negligible random packet loss).
This proposal is about carrying out a systematic, experimental investigation of performance
of TCP over wired/wireless paths. This investigation will include the comparison of various
TCP enhancements proposed so far in the literature. It will consider a representative set of
experimental environments and application scenarios. The proposed project is in part
motivated by our recent positive experience with TCPW Internet experiments of large file
transfers over lossy paths. In this project the researchers will broaden the scope to include a vast gamut of TCP wireless enhancement techniques. The researchers will identify the pros and cons of each scheme, characterize the traffic/network environment for which it is best suited, and, more generally, develop models that relate wireless media characteristics, TCP congestion control
parameters and performance results.
In summary, given: (1) the increasing importance of nomadic computing and wireless access
to the high speed wired Internet; (2) the performance degradations observed in conventional
TCP protocols over wireless path, and (3) the encouraging improvements offered by
modified, wireless versions of TCP (which yet retain the basic end to end paradigm), the researchers believe this a very appropriate time to engage in a systematic, experimentally based
evaluation of wireless TCP protocols by a team that includes protocol developers,
applications developers and network measurement experts.

WHYNET: Scalable Testbed for Next Generation Mobile Wireless Networking Technologies
The next generation of wireless communication technology is likely to rely on cross-layer interactions
that extend from the application layer down to the physical devices. This project proposes to design and
develop WHYNET, a Wireless HYbrid NETwork testbed to facilitate detailed study of such interactions and
their impact on application level performance in heterogeneous wireless systems. The eventual technical
impact of this testbed will be to redefine how specific innovations in wireless communication technologies are
evaluated in terms of their potential to improve application-level performance as well as how alternative
approaches are compared with each other. Its broader impact will be to redefine how students are trained in
wireless technologies by providing a multi-disciplinary 'hands on' environment to complement purely
theoretical classroom training.

WHYNET is envisaged as a hybrid testbed that combines the realism of physical testing with the
scalability and flexibility of simulations. The hybrid testbed will be a networked federation of geographically
distributed, heterogeneous wireless physical testbeds with multiple protocol stacks (CDMA 2000 cellular and IP), next generation physical technologies including UWB (Ultra Wide Band), MIMO (Multiple Inputs,
Multiple Outputs) and SDR (Software Defined Radios), and a parallel & distributed multi-tool simulation
framework. Beyond providing a more accurate & flexible evaluation framework, the hybrid testbed will
facilitate a smooth transition from an abstract simulation model to an operational implementation within a
single framework. For instance, protocol prototypes can communicate with simulated lower layers for
repeatable results, or receive and process variable rate real multimedia application inputs for perceptual
evaluation. Once the physical hardware devices are ready for testing, a portion of the target network system
can be configured with real devices while the rest of the network can still reside in the simulated hardware
domain. The effort will also generate a repository of wireless networking scenarios, measurements, models
and implementations. A representative set of studies will be used to demonstrate the unique contributions of
WHYNET for cross-layer optimization studies in particular, and mobile wireless networking in general. These include sensor networks, energy-aware networking, protocols & middleware for multi-access networking, and adaptive transport and security protocols. The testbed itself will be accessible by the research community via a web-based mechanism that will allow remote uploading of models, implementations, and configurations.

The proposed research is likely to have a broader impact on two fronts: the training of future generation
of wireless engineers and wireless technology standards. Wireless engineers will need significant technical
depth to contribute to a rapidly developing technology and significant technical breadth to understand how this
technology fits into a market driven economy. The latter category requires engineers who are trained in
insystemslt aspects with an in-depth understanding of trade-offs and interactions across layers of a wireless
communication system. The current course structure is not designed to produce well-trained engineers of the
second type. The project team feels strongly that broad systems training can only be accomplished in i.hands-
onlo experimental courses or projects where the students see the tradeoffs involved in real system design. The proposed testbed can enable these types of courses across the curriculum. Even though today wireless is a
vertical technology, 4-5 years from now, the most interesting and challenging problems will be those related to wireless systems, so we believe that an inter-disciplinary yet closely-knit engineering program such as ours is well suited for the training of wireless engineer of tomorrow. By providing a scalable platform, methodology, and tools to support objective and accurate evaluation of protocol and technology alternatives, we expect that the testbed will also play an important role in shaping standards activity in IETF and related bodies.

A multi-disciplinary, multi-institution team has been formed to achieve the ambitious objectives of the
WHYNET project. The team members have substantial expertise in design and management of physical and
simulation testbeds (Bagrodia, Gerla, Rao, Takai), development of novel radio technology (Daneshrad, Fitz,
Mitra), wireless systems (Mitra, Rao, Srivastava), protocol design (Gerla, Krishnamurthy, Mohapatra, Royer, Shen, Srivastava, Tripathi) and performance evaluation (Bagrodia, Gerla, Molle, Rao, Tripathi). Many of thePIs have successfully worked together on previous collaborative projects. We have also received strong support from a number of companies that play a critical role in this space including Microsoft, Hughes
Research Laboratories (now part of Boeing), ST Electronics, HP, Ericsson, Intel, and Xtreme Spectrum.

NeTS - Collaborative Research - NR: Over-Probe: A Toolkit for the Management of Overlay Networks with Mobile Users

Mario Gerla, UCLA

Award 0435515

Abstract

The main goal of this project is to develop efficient path probing and topology management schemes for overlays that support mobile users. Overlays facilitate the deployment of functions not available from the commercial Internet (e.g., multicasting, QoS-aware routing etc.). While conventional overlays so far have connected stationary users, the overlays of the future must support also mobile customers. There is need for hybrid wired and wireless overlays that include wireless segments and even "opportunistic" ad hoc networks (e.g., networks of cars in an urban environment).
To respond to such needs, this project develops OverProbe, a new toolkit that includes the innovative probing technique CapProbe and works for both wired and wireless overlay links. OverProbe evaluates "virtual link" quality very rapidly. Speed is critical in wireless since the user at the end of the path may move across different type of wireless media (e.g., 3G, 802.11, Bluetooth, CDMA, etc.) within minutes. Besides frequent monitoring of wireless connectivity, the toolkit assists mobile users in soft handoff without breaking TCP connections. The research also includes the design and evaluation of scalable, hierarchical overlay structures (using "backbone overlays").
The results of this research will help promote new services among the mobile community, from telecommuting, to e-commerce and entertainment. Key results include: (1) A set of path probing methodologies and tools (Over-Probe toolkit). (2) A two level overlay and proxy architecture. (3) OverProbe implementation in PlanetLab and WHYNET.

This project is supporting the NSF Wireless Networking PI meeting in December 2005. The meeting will be rich in new, exciting results in several areas of the wireless networks field. Important contributions are expected from the projects related to spectrum sharing, agile radio usage, and efficiency. In the past few years the wireless industry has become acutely aware of the spectrum limitations that have bounded communication system to a specific frequency band with a pre-selected modulation scheme. Progress in emerging technologies like Software Definable Radios (SDRs) and Cognitive Radios (CRs) will be reported by the PIs. Other significant breakthroughs will be likely announced in mesh and ad hoc architectures, cooperative wireless networking, and other areas.

This project aims to involve the wireless and mobile network research communities in a discussion of new architectures and disruptive technologies for the future Internet, leading to a white paper with future R&D recommendations. The objective is to solicit service requirements and innovative network architecture concepts from wireless, mobile and sensor net researchers at universities and industrial/government research labs, and to consolidate this input into a coherent vision/agenda for future research and experimental infrastructure needs.

The purpose of this workshop on Peer-to-Peer Mobile Ad Hoc Networks - New Research Issues is to explore architectural issues in mobile ad hoc networks and how the peer-to-peer overlay paradigm can be used in this environment. Multiple peer-to-peer networks, corresponding to different applications, may coexist on a large ad hoc network structure (eg, emergency response, urban vehicular grid, etc.). This workshop will focus on the applicability of wired peer-to-peer models to the wireless scenarios and more generally to the research problems emerging in the ad hoc peer-to-peer area.

The focus of this project is the networking of intelligent, autonomous swarms. The typical application scenario is a disaster area that requires the intervention of police, firemen, paramedics etc, but where the unfriendly environment bars direct access. The swarm establishes a communications network between the rescue teams and all critical fixed and mobile sensors and actuators in the disaster area. In the aftermath of a disaster typically some disconnected "islands" of sensors, monitors and actuators have survived the impact. A rapidly deployed swarm of air/ground agents reestablishes network connectivity, restores access to critical sensor probes, installs new probes as necessary and helps the collection and filtering of relevant data. This goal is achieved with the concurrent interworking of several elements: agile, programmable radios that can work in adverse, highly heterogeneous conditions; flexible network protocols for swarm to swarm communications and for "mobile backbone" deployment; adaptive video streaming, and; advanced vision processing for location and motion estimation.
Scientific contributions and broader impacts will include:
(1) robust, reconfigurable Mobile Backbone design methodology for emergency networking
(2) modular, flexible, programmable MAR radio technology for unfriendly/hostile scenarios.
(3) real time video streaming and "delayed" forwarding.
(4) In-swarm processing of video data for image registration and mosaicing, including partial 3-D reconstruction and matching to existing blueprint and mapping data
(5) Region-of-interest computation for visual odometry and swarm configuration refinement

A Grant to fund Student Travel to Mobicom 2006 in Los Angeles, Sept 24-29, 2006

This Grant supports travel for students attending Mobicom 2006, in particular assisting the students with financial needs. The twelfth ACM International conference on Mobile Communications (Mobicom 2006) takes place in Los Angeles, California, September 24-29, 2006. Mobicom 2006 is a high caliber forum for research on systems issues in the area of mobile, wireless communications and computing . Mobicom topics span multiple disciplines, including wireless communication, vehicular communications, personal area networks, ad hoc networks, operating systems, distributed algorithms, data processing, scheduling, sensors, and signal processing. Mobicom provides a cross-disciplinary venue for researchers addressing the design of mobile computing in the context of an integrated system.

The main goal of this NSF Grant is to provide graduate students in the networking and mobile computing area the opportunity to attend Mobicom 2006, meet with leaders in their field and take part in discussions that are likely to shape their future careers. Besides technical paper presentations in the topics mentioned above, the venue offers a wide range of other stimulating activities including panels, tutorials, industry presentations, posters, demos, and keynote talks. Experience shows that the mere exposure to these technical presentations helps students fine tune their research topics and even find new ones, with important long term benefits to the field at large.

This project aim at defining, optimizing and implementing a novel underwater sensor network architecture, called SEA-Swarm (Sensor Equipped Aquatic Swarm), that consists of a large number of low cost underwater sensors that operate and move as a group (swarm) with water current and dispersion. The proposed SEA-Swarm architecture will enable a whole new era of observations, monitoring and explorations in the aqueous environment. Such tool will be by its very essence multidisciplinary and is expected to foster a broad collaboration between researchers in networking and communications and other scientific communities, such as environmental sciences, marine biology and coastal surveillance and security. A number of technological challenges shall be addressed by this project, along with the related fundamental research aspects: a new generation of underwater acoustic communications modems is to be designed based on OFDM, achieving unprecedented data rates thanks to Doppler compensation and MIMO space-time signal processing techniques. Cooperative communication protocols, driven by the information theoretic relay channel, are synergistically optimized jointly with a new energy efficient geo-routing algorithm. In essence, all the nodes in a virtual pipe from source to destination cooperate to reliably deliver the message. For reliable data transport, network coding for erasure correction and packet combining for energy efficiency is investigated. Finally, efficient localization schemes based on underwater GPS and nodes with dedicated data-collection functions (data mules) are advocated in order to tackle the mobility and the topology randomness problems due to the swarm nature of the network. The cross-layer design involving the above aspects is validated through a dedicated simulation environment (Aqua-Sim). A cost-effective over-the-water acoustic communication testbed shall be developed by USC in order to provide proof of concept of the basic network algorithms. Finally, an underwater testbed proof of concept is planned in synergy with other existing projects such as MyPond and MySound at U-Conn, and at the UCLA Marina Aquatic Center. The theoretical and experimental work at all three collaborating teams shall involve graduate students and also expose undergraduate students to state-of-the art communication engineering projects, developed in the framework of the above mentioned testbeds.

We are proposing to organize an NSF sponsored Workshop at Rutgers University, New Jersey, July 31-Aug 1st, 2007. The theme will be wireless mobility. The past two decades have brought about a major shift from fixed to mobile phones all over the world. Mobile phones today outnumber fixed ones in most countries. The same shift from fixed to mobile has happened more recently in the access to the Internet from personal computing platforms, laptops and PDAs. This trend is now bringing MANETs, once confined to battlefield, to urban and even domestic scenarios.

This proposal seeks NSF travel funding support in order to organize a Workshop where the critical research issues involving wireless mobility will be discussed. In particular, what is the impact of mobility on wireless applications; how can the Infrastructure help manage mobility; how can mobility be used to advantage (in routing, content discovery, connectivity management). How can we best test the new mobility trade offs with mobility testbeds?

Broader Impact: The workshop will bring together systems researchers active in various different domains and applications. Intellectual Merit: research on MANET mobility will lead to sophisticated analytic modeling and simulation techniques.

The proposal requests partial support for students to participate in MobiCom 2008 in San Francisco, Sept 14-19, 2008. The NSF support will provide opportunities for twenty young participants to interact with established researchers. MobiCom 2008 introduces a high caliber forum for research on systems issues in the emerging area of mobile, wireless communication and computing. The research and development results reported in MobiCom conferences span multiple disciplines, including wireless communication, vehicular communications, personal area networks, ad hoc networks, operating systems,


The broader impact of the proposal is to provide providing graduate students conducting research in the mobile computing field the opportunity to not only attend high-caliber technical presentations and be exposed to the state-of-the-art research in the field, but also to interact with peer graduate students world-wide, to meet with senior leading researchers in the field, and to take part in discussions that are likely to shape their future careers.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The Health Guardian project provides medical care through Wireless Health: remote monitoring, wearable body area sensors and wireless communications. The goal is to promote independent living by improving home patient care quality (and reduce costs) while enabling the care of mobile individuals. Today, doctors and nurses manually record and track patients? status. This manual process cannot guarantee accuracy and efficiency in the face of increasing complexity of sensed data and measurement procedures. However, remote, automated monitoring has become technically feasible. This program introduces a BodyLAN interconnecting body sensors to a data collection gateway, the ?Health Guardian?. In turn, the Health Guardian connects to external networks to propagate the data for further processing. Leveraging the growing popularity of P2P personal networks, this project enables new patient care models based on P2P networking among patients and care providers.
Broader Impact: Wireless health will reach into homes, workplace environments and rural communities. The foundation for emerging new applications and business opportunities that range from networking of individuals interacting in health, wellness and safety to rehabilitation and disease management of clinical patients. On the education front, creation of cross cutting project-oriented undergraduate and graduate courses.
Intellectual merits: Innovative research in delay tolerant, reliable networking between Body LAN, Guardian and Internet overcoming intermittent wireless connectivity; cooperation among peers to share critical resources and discover ?useful? neighbors with the help of Social Network techniques; concept validation via clinical trials.

In this project, the researchers focus on the challenges of designing a real-time networked sensing and actuation platform for future 'intelligent' metropolitan traffic management with the aim of simultaneously reducing congestion, pollution, and traveler delays. Today, most urban traffic control is rudimentary: in smaller cities many traffic signals remain isolated, and while most larger cities have integrated systems of signals, they for the most part, are not dynamically timed in response to real-time vehicle information. Congestion fees, which are increasingly popular as a traffic management and revenue-generating tool, are usually based on historical traffic data rather than varying dynamically to reflect instantaneous conditions. Recent advances in communication, navigation, and sensor technologies present far more opportunities to increase the intelligence and efficiency of metropolitan streets than are in place today.

The pivotal element of the proposed Green City intelligent transport architecture will be the ability to 'close the loop' between traffic/pollution sensing and traffic control; a system achieved through an incentivized collaboration between the central traffic management and the drivers. In this collaboration, the 'intelligent' traffic signals, the Navigator Server and the on-board navigators play key roles. In addition to the traditional control of vehicular flow at signalized intersections, future traffic signal systems will sense traffic characteristics and vehicular emissions, collect data from vehicle sensors (pollution, emission, position, etc.), and broadcast traffic advisories, routings, and restrictions to on-board navigators. The Navigator Server interacts with central traffic controllers, and proposes optimal routes to the on-board navigators. Finally, the on-board navigators, incentivized by congestion/pollution fees and/or 'good navigation' credits, propose optimal routings based on drivers' preferences, local perceived traffic, and signal timing. All this is enabled by efficient vehicle to roadway infrastructure communications, from 3G channels to DSRC radios (roadside and on-board) that enable real-time, low cost, scalable information exchanges among the various architecture components.

Broader Impact: This project will be highly interdisciplinary; it will benefit from the collaboration and expertise of computer science, atmospheric science, and urban planning faculty and students. The efficacy of our solution will be demonstrated via simulation, emulation, and experimentation. New education opportunities will result from the multidisciplinary nature of the project.

The Global Environment for Network Innovations 'GENI' is a suite of research infrastructure supported by the NSF that is rapidly emerging in prototype form across the United States. GENI aims to transform experimental research in networking and distributed systems, as well as emerging research into very large socio-technical systems, by providing a suite of infrastructure for 'at scale' experiments in future internets.

The GENI Project Office organizes three major GENI Engineering conferences (GEC) per year, in which the entire GENI community meets to review current status, and to decide on subsequent steps in GENI's evolution. These GECs include community-based working groups leading GENI's design and planning, and demonstrating progress with live experiments.

UCLA is hosting the thirteenth edition of the GENI Engineering conference. This project supports organizing the demo session to be held on the UCLA Campus. About 400 leading researchers and Ph.D. students from diverse US institutions will gather at UCLA to showcase their ideas and results. The Campus Technology Services will fit the venue to support high speed networking experiments both wired and wireless. In particular, a 10GB link will be enabled and each demo will be provided with 1G wired connection. The venue will be also connected to the National Lambda Rail (NLR) and Internet2 Interoperable On-demand Network (ION) network infrastructures thus enabling researchers and practitioners to access all the GENI sites nationwide. Each GEC 13th participant will be issued temporary campus-wide wireless credentials that will grant access to the campus wireless infrastructure and commodity Internet for the duration of the event. Furthermore, 4G wireless connectivity will be made available through the GENI-WiMax infrastructure.

Broader Impact: The GEC Demo sessions provide graduate students with both an opportunity to demonstrate and explain their work to the GENI community prior to formal publication. It helps new graduate students understand what is being done with GENI and encourages cross-university cooperation by providing a method for students and faculty to discover who amongst their peers at other institutions might be valuable resources. It also supports outreach to new community members, including the emerging US Ignite community.

This Project establishes a live OpenFlow (OF) test bed on the UCLA campus, which researchers in different disciplines will use to run experiments requiring high volume data exchange, intense processing, and/or seamless mobility as a production level service on the campus network. UCLA will link the campus OF network to national OF fabrics via the regional CENIC OF network. This pilot deployment will support four key applications from the domains of eScience, GENI and smart transportation, health care, and manufacturing. The campus implementation support the above applications will consist of a 10Gbps OF-enabled hub switch connected to CENIC and multiple second-tier OF switches associated with the four projects.

Although software-defined networking (SDN) technologies are currently being widely discussed and are key elements in the GENI architecture, there is little operational or campus-level architectural experience with using them. The project will explore the issues associated with deploying SDNs and connecting them to real-time information sources. The work will rework current UCLA network engineering practice where extensive hardware reconfiguration is required to support the sophisticated processing and efficient storage of data by several of the research centers. Flexible reconfiguration is a new paradigm for campus networks. The PIs will report on their experience in technical papers. Travel budget is included for presentation of findings at the GENI Engineering Conferences.


Broader Impact:
This project will provide an opportunity to gain experience with architectural, deployment, administrative and operational issues of OpenFlow in campus networks and will disseminate the findings via GENI Engineering Conferences. The project will provide opportunities for undergraduate students to work with advanced networking technologies. Societal impacts outside of the campus will include the work on vehicular traffic monitoring, health monitoring for mobile patients and support for improved manufacturing practices.

There is growing global importance of ocean exploration and monitoring as the oceans play a major role in climate regulation, nutrient production, resource retrieval and transportation, etc. Building and deploying a real-time underwater networked sensing infrastructure is thus needed for desired levels of monitoring and data collection. Despite a wave of research efforts in the area of underwater wireless networks, the lack of a community testbed has so far hampered further advances, as there is no common platform to evaluate and compare various communication and networking algorithms and protocols. Furthermore very few studies can afford to consider real system features due to the high cost of system deployment and maintenance.

This project involves the design and deployment of an open underwater testbed suite, accessible to the public at four sites in Connecticut, California, Texas, and Washington States. The testbed will include flexible choices of surface nodes, bottom nodes, and mobile nodes with reconfigurable modems. It will enable the vision of remote controlled and continuous networked node deployments running tests of communication, networking, sensing, and data streaming. In addition, the testbed will enable oceanographers to study scientific research questions, while using the testbed as a prototype for larger real-time monitoring deployments elsewhere. The testbed will also directly impact undergraduate research and student diversity by involving undergraduate students through REU programs, impacting curriculum development by enabling field courses, and engaging K-12 students and teachers, particularly in underserved communities.

Researchers seek to provide real-time ultraviolet (UV) monitoring across the globe for pedestrians with an UV-exposure monitoring technology for the purpose of protecting users from sun over-exposure and aiding in skin cancer prevention. Using a cell phone device and a Bluetooth enabled UV sensor, volunteers walking outdoors contribute to constructing a global UV irradiance map in their respective areas, by periodically uploading UV irradiance samples to the technology's web service. Subsets of the aggregated UV readings are made anonymous, geographically segmented, then made available to the general public for location based UV irradiance queries via a webpage. With smart phone and the technology's App, the typical customer, even without wearing a UV sensor, can keep track of cumulative exposure and can plan travel paths that minimize UV exposure before stepping outdoors.

This technology has the potential to have significant impacts on health and wellness both near and long-term. In the near term: (1) Build a global UV irradiance map in real-time at the pedestrian level through participatory sensing; (2) estimate the pedestrians' UV exposure traveling along a path before they step outdoors: A personal UV monitoring device can prevent over-exposure, however only performs incremental or post processing of the pedestrian's UV exposure. In the long-term: this technology could be used to correlate the pedestrian's UV exposure patterns with skin cancer types: Today, there is little data that correlates UV exposure to the onset of any type of Skin Cancer. If 1 in 5 people are projected to get skin cancer, 20-30 years from now Physicians may be able to obtain UV exposure data from users of this technology that contract skin cancer provided their consent.

ACM MobiCom conference is the leading international conference on mobile computing and wireless networking. It invites research contributions addressing the challenges in the area of mobile computing, from the perspective of networks, wireless and mobile systems, algorithms, and applications. The conference features a high-quality technical program, with an acceptance rate of around 10% out of around 250 submissions. It has a single-track session, which offers significant opportunities for individual and small groups that foster technical and social interactions among a diverse set of participants. MobiCom is also an international conference that stimulates exchanges between various international research communities.

This award will help increase the representation and participation of United States-based students at the conference by providing 20 travel grants. By creating new opportunities for graduate students, especially those from under-represented groups, to attend a high-quality conference, this award will benefit the students by giving them an opportunity to interact with world-class researchers, inspire them to try new research directions, providing mentoring opportunities, as well as the chance to seek out internships and post-doctoral positions which will help the students advance in their research career.

Technological advances have moved society into an exciting era of mobile computing. Our daily lives can be further enriched by a new generation of mobile applications, such as augmented reality (AR) which broadens one's real-world perception by harmonizing sound, image, video, and sensors from multiple sources to aid comprehension and navigation. However, today's Internet operates with the address-based TCP/IP protocol architecture developed 40 years ago, which greatly limits the full promises of these new applications. Thus, current AR implementations face challenges in performance, scalability and availability upon disasters. This proposed research project (ICE-AR) aims to develop a new wireless network architecture to address these limitations and provide pervasive support for these emerging applications.

The ICE-AR project team will apply and extend six years of research efforts on Named Data Networking (NDN), a realization of the Information Centric Networking (ICN) vision, to create this new architecture. The design emphasizes application-level data naming, data-centric security and computing, asynchronous publishing and consumption, and efficient use of local and proximate resources. The architecture will unify latest advances in wireless communication with domain-specific computing technologies to accelerate AR at the wireless edge and deliver robust performance, with or without the pre-deployed infrastructure support.