Symeon Papavassiliou - US grants

The explosive growth of the Internet and the continued dramatic increase for all wireless services are fueling the demand for increased capacity, data rates, supported multimedia services, and support for different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for different classes of services. Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) has been proposed as a key air interface technique for third generation (3G) wireless systems, and will continue to be adopted as a strong candidate for 4G systems that will provide differentiated services to multimedia traffic. With the capability of dynamically varying user channel rates, WCDMA systems can provide more flexibility in bandwidth allocation. Although the out-coming new radio technology will bring more bandwidth at air interface, if not managed properly, the bandwidth resources will not meet the requirements of future users.
In order to address the overall problem of offering efficient and effective wireless multimedia services that meet the users' QoS (Quality of Service) requirements in mobile wireless networks we plan to provide an integrated solution by investigating the various involved problems from two different levels and angles which are aligned with the two main elements associated with the networks under consideration: wireless nature and mobility.
Specifically, given the strict multimedia user requirements, in order to satisfy the main objective of this proposal of designing efficient wireless resource allocation methods we first remove the traditional assumptions of infinite number of users and fixed packet lengths, and analyze the wireless system performance under a more general and realistic case with finite population of voice and data users, finite buffers and variable packet length for data users. Given the wireless nature of the environment under consideration and the variations in the channel capacity, an efficient data rate scheduling scheme that adapts to the changing channel condition is investigated in order to maximize the weighted system throughput. An adaptive compensation technique is also employed in order to guarantee the fair allocation of resources among the competing users despite of the variation of channel capacity. Furthermore in order to deal with the issue of mobility and congestion in mobile wireless networks and their impact on the users' QoS, we study the enhancement of admission control and handoff process by introducing and investigating the following additional dimensions: flexible advanced bandwidth reservation and reconfiguration to optimize the bandwidth utilization especially when services with flexible QoS are supported; integration of pricing and admission control to maximize the users' total utility and alleviate or minimize the network congestion; design of a mobile agent based system to provide a flexible and comprehensive framework to implement these management processes and schemes.
The proposed educational plan includes: undergraduate and graduate teaching; introduction of new courses; graduate student advising and mentoring; undergraduate project supervision; participation in an outreach program; lectures at local technical high schools; and finally, enhancement of existing laboratory infrastructure and facilities. Among the objectives of the education plan is to create an attractive research and educational environment in which both graduate and undergraduate students alike can collaborate and work together in order to learn and discover. Furthermore NJIT has a significant presence of minority and women students (~40% and ~18% respectively) and it is expected that some of these students will have the opportunity to contribute to this project. Finally I expect that the proposed plan will allow me to continue to expand on the already established international dimension of my career-development.

In addition to the traffic growth in the Internet, new applications and services are imposing a large variety of requirements. At the same time, the emergence of network applications on video, audio, business services, and other data ser-vices is creating an imminent demand for integration of most traffic with de-fined quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Examples of emerging network re-quirements are directly related to reliability, recoverability, and security. Al-though most of these requirements have kindled research interests in recent years, it is still unclear how to integrate them for next generation networks. To manage the increasing variety of QoS requirements, this research project pro-poses a new service model concept, called service vector, as a solution for pro-viding QoS support for a large variety of traffic classes. This concept is expected to help achieving the following objectives: a) robust differentiated service model capable of supporting fine QoS granularity; b) scalability; c) satisfaction of the users' customized end-to-end requirements; d) improved network operator revenue; e) higher utilization of the current Diffserv network model. The com-plexity and feasibility of service vectors for the next generation networks is in-vestigated, and the impact on router architectures and deployment issues are considered for the implementation of service vectors in new-generation and de-ployed routers.

This project, enhancing and facilitating the establishment and operation of a network testbed, provides a wired and wireless network infrastructure to support ongoing and future research. The institution will acquire integrative research instrumentation consisting of a traffic generator/analyzer and wireless equipment, for the completion of an experimental state-of-the-art testbed. The high end traffic generator/ analyzer services the analysis and measurement of results of applied methods in the network, under traffic conditions that highly approximate the scenarios in actual realistic core networks, providing the capability of enhancing models by comparing them against real-life experimental data. The wireless access points and the mobile computers/devices supporting different wireless access technologies will not only support research efforts in the area of wireless networking, but enable the study of the user's end-to-end performance in a realistic hybrid networking environment as well. The current research projects place emphasis on the implementation of novel schemes for QoS networks, switch architectures, and network processing units needed to cope with current and future demands of the Internet evolution. The work addresses feasibility and deployability issues of network protocols, schemes, and applications in the next generation Internet, offering seamless integrated services and emulating the future hybrid network environments where wireless access and networking technologies take significant roles. Developed mechanisms are then tested for inter-operation of wireline and wireless solutions. The infrastructure supports the following research projects:
Dynamic Network Anomaly/Attack Detection and Management,
Deployment and Implementation of Explicit Endpoint Admission Control Schemes,
Scalable Internet Routers, and
Wireless Access Networks.

Broader Impact: The infrastructure contributes to provide education and training in next generation Internet technologies.

Abstract

Proposal: CNS 0454081
PI: Constantine Manikopoulos
Institution: New Jersey Institute of Technology
Program: NSF 04-588 CISE Computing Research Infrastructure
CRI: 'SmartCampus' A Wireless Mobile Community System with People-To-People-To- Places Services

This project will create a mobile, wireless NJIT campus community system that will serve as a dispersed laboratory for the study of location-based, online communities with People-To-People-To-Places (P3) Services, in terms of: 1) community building; 2) co-ordination of mobile teams; 3) user privacy [personal location data]; and 4) security. This campus-wide facility will allow the integration of activities across many laboratories and enable anywhere, anytime participation by both students and faculty. SmartCampus will aid the analysis and understanding of the underlying technical and social issues and their interactions, taking into account rising privacy concerns. The latter will be addressed from two perspectives: 1) improving system security and trust with the development of ConexGuard, a novel SmartCampus security-on-demand framework for its heterogeneous environment, and 2) creating privacy-sensitive applications that exploit relevant contextual factors - properties of people and places, and relationships between them - thus addressing issues distinct to P3-Systems. The team includes social scientists, computer scientists and electrical engineers in an interdisciplinary effort addressing issues of emerging interest - particularly privacy in community systems. Broader impacts include education and field testing in Newark New jersey.