The Connected Project

http://www.sics.se/cna/connected/

Summary

`Everything always connected' is the overall theme of this project. Mobile units will always be connected to the global infrastructure. Many small devices, appliances, will also be connected to the same global network. The objectives of the project is to provide research results in the domain of mobile networking applicable to the overall project theme. Spontaneous and ad-hoc networks are two important networking concepts for realizing seamless mobile networking. Proxy architectures for supporting small networked devices is a means for enabling networked appliances. The project addresses a number of research problems within these areas:

Internet routing and addressing for seamless Internet connectivity in spontaneous networks requiring minimal configuration.
Security in spontaneous networks with emphasis on user convenience.
Minimal protocol implementation with proxy support for small devices.
Security for minimal devices.
Client/Server Proxy architectures.
Monitoring of performance characteristics needed for optimal client/server proxy interaction.

Mobile communication is one of the main driving forces for the telecommunications industry as a whole, including smaller businesses. New mobile phones with web browsing capabilities are being introduced, enabling services such as news and weather reports, ticket booking and time table services. The anticipated results from the project is directly addressing problems within this mobile computer network domain. The project is a 2 year joint effort between two research groups:

The Computer and Network Architectures laboratory (CNA), Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS).
The Distributed Systems and Data Communication group (DSDC), Department of Computer Systems (DoCS), Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University.

Complete specification available in postscript and pdf.

Project objectives and scenarios

The project has two scenarios that guide the research. The first scenario is a meeting room where people that possibly have not met before come together for a meeting. The goal in this scenario is to create a spontaneous network that securely connects the participant's portable computers, PDAs, etc., with no or very little user configuration and without infrastructure support. During the first project year we started developing a spontaneous networking testbed that will be completed during 2001.

The second scenario comes from a collaboration with the Arena project at the Mäkitalo Research Center in Luleå. That project has a vision of a virtual arena and the creation of an enhanced experience for the audience both inside and outside the physical arena. The first application is ice-hockey. The Connected project is providing a small TCP/IP protocol stack implementation, lwIP, for sensors placed on the hockey player. An important characteristics is that the small unit should be a full network citizen to preserve end-to-end protocol semantics.

Middleware for Mobile Services are needed in both these scenarios. Sensor and video information from a hockey player must be adapted to all the different user devices the audience will carry with them. Individuals in the audience may want to decide which player they want to follow and what sensors they want to subscribe to. The project develops proxy architectures that personalizes such sessions to individuals, their terminal types and to the characteristics of the networks they are connected to.

Partners

Papers

Andy Bavier, Thiemo Voigt, Mike Wawrzoniak, Larry Peterson and Per Gunningberg. "SILK: Scout paths in the Linux Kernel." Technical Report 2002-009, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala Sweden, 2002. In Postscript.
Henrik R Lundgren, David Lundberg, Erik Nordström, Christian F. Tschudin, Uppsala University, Sweden, Johan Nielsen "A Large-scale Testbed for Reproducible Ad hoc Protocol Evaluations". WCNC 2002, Orlando, March 2002.
Sebastien Ardon, Per Gunningberg, Yuri Ismailov, Björn Landfeldt, marius Portmann, Aruna Seneviratne and Binh Thai. "Mobile Aware Server Architecture: A distributed architecture for content adaptation", INET 2001, June 2001, Stockholm. In PDF.
Mats Björkman and Bob Melander. "Impact of the Ethernet Capture Effect on Bandwidth Measurements". In IFIP High Performance Networking (HPN), Paris, France, May 14-19, 2000. In postscript.
Adam Dunkels. "Minimal TCP/IP Implementation with Proxy Support". MSc Thesis. Technical report T2001:20. SICS - Swedish Institute of Computer Science, February 2001. In pdf.
Laura Marie Feeney, Bengt Ahlgren and Assar Westerlund. "Spontaneous Networking: An Application-Oriented Approach to Ad Hoc Networking". IEEE Communications Magazine, 39(6), June 2001. Special Issue on Ad Hoc Networking. In postscript.
Björn Knutsson and Per Gunningberg. "Automatic Proxy Configuration". In The 7th International Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Communications (MoMuC), Tokyo, Japan, October 23-26, 2000. In pdf.
Björn Knutsson and Per Gunningberg. "Automatic Proxy Configuration and Placement". Awaiting publication. In postscript.
Björn Knutsson and Larry Peterson. "Transparent TCP Proxy Signalling". Journal of Communications and Networks, March 2001. In postscript.
Bob Melander, Mats Björkman and Per Gunningberg. "A New End-to-End Probing and Analysis Method for Estimating Bandwidth Bottlenecks". In IEEE Globecom - Global Internet Symposium, San Francisco, November 2000. In postscript.
Bob Melander, Mats Björkman and Per Gunningberg. "Regression-Based Available Bandwidth Measurements". Awaiting publication. In PDF.
Mattias Östergren. "TCP Performance in Ad Hoc Networks", MSc Thesis, Technical report T2000:14. SICS - Swedish Institute of Computer Science, November 2000. In Compressed PostScript.

PhD thesis

Björn Knutsson. "Architectures for Application Transparent Proxies: A Study of Network Enhancing Software", PhD Thesis, DoCS 01/118, Uppsala University, in PDF.

Prototypes

lwIP: lwIP is a small implementation of the TCP/IP protocol stack suitable for systems with limited memory and CPU power. More information.

APE: Ad hoc Protocol Evaluation testbed. Its intended use is for evaluation of mobile ad hoc routing protocols. More information.

AODV-UU: A Linux implementation of the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing. More information.

SILK: An implementation of Scout paths in the Linux Kernel for controlled QoS of standard Linux applications. More information avaliable in PostScript.