Wireless Networking and Telecommunications Research
at Washington University in Saint Louis

The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at Washington University in Saint Louis has a very aggressive program of research in Networking and Telecommunications. We are participating in many industry forums such as WiMAX Forum, IEEE 802, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), ANSI, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and Telecommunications Industry of America (TIA). We collaborate with industry to ensure that we are working on relevant problems of current interest and that our solutions are adopted by the industry.

The Wireless networking research at Washington University in Saint Louis is lead by Prof. Raj Jain.

In addition, we collaborate with several faculty members in the related areas of Mobile computing, High Speed Switching and Routing.

Current Research Projects:

  1. Internet 3.0: Architecture for the Next Generation Internet
  2. Broadband Wireless Access Media Access Control Modeling
  3. QoS and Resource Management in Multi-Radio Systems
  4. TCP Persistence
  5. Congestion Management in Data Center Networks
  6. Security in Mobile Sensor Networks

Internet 3.0: Architecture for the Next Generation Internet

If we were to design the Internet now, what features would be implement and how. This is along the lines of Global Environment for Networking Innovation (GENI) and Future Internet Design (FIND) program National Science Foundation (NSF). We have deloped the outline of a new architecture for the next generation. For further information, please see our Milcom 2006 paper and related talks.

Broadband Wireless Access Modeling

We are leading the simulation methodology effort at WiMAX Forum and helping to analyze Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (H-ARQ) and performance of various applications on WiMAX Systems. We are also developing new efficient scheduling algorithms for WiMAX systems.

In a multi-cell environment, mobile subscribers experience interference from transmissions from other near-by base stations and subscribers. We are developing channel models that help quantify this interference and help estimate the feasible data rate on the channel.

QoS and Resource Management in Multi-Radio Systems

Network connectivity and routing issues with multi-radio end systems. Most computers in near future will have 3G, WiMAX, 802.11, and Ethernet connectivity. How to best use all these connections simultaneoulsy given application characteristics.

TCP Persistence

Wireless systems do not have continuous connectivity. Disconnections at TCP level cause applications to restart from the beginning particularly if the IP address changes after the reconnection. We are looking into ways to make TCP persistent.

Congestion Management in Data Center Networks

IEEE 802.1au group is working on developing a new congestion notification scheme for Ethernets in data centers. We have developed a forward explicit rate congestion notification (FECN) scheme that provides very fast convergence to fair and stable rates and stable queue lengths. See our contributions ot IEEE 802.1au for the details of our proposal.

Security in Mobile Sensor Networks

We have developed two key predistribution schemes based scheme for heterogeneous networks i.e. networks which consist of nodes which are stationary as well as highly mobile. The first approach uses a separate disjoint key pool to establish links between the stationary and mobile nodes of the network. In the second approach we take a large key pool and segment it into smaller key pools. Each of these segments acts as the key pool for different stationary sensor networks. The mobile nodes get keys from the aggregate of all these segments.

With the growth and acceptance of the Internet, there has been increased interest in maintaining anonymity in the network. Using traffic analysis, it is possible to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. We have developed a novel approach to hide the senders and the receivers of messages. Routes are chosen and frames traverse these routes. Each frame consists of a token and a node can send a message through a frame only when the corresponding token is free.

See our papers on key and tokens for further details.

Collaboration:

In addition to traditional sources of research funding, our research in the past has also been sponsored by: Nortel Networks, Nokia, Fore Systems, Lockheed Martin, AT&T Foundation, Lucent Corporation, Intel, PMC Sierra, Adtech Corp, Cascade Communications, and Stratacom (Cisco).
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