Paper Accepted – Passive WiFi

[December 3, 2020] Our journalized version of the paper on leveraging passive WiFi characteristics for determining the available bandwidth was recently accepted to appear in the IEEE Internet of Things journal.

Very cool paper that leverages the spacing of plaintext block acknowledgements (ACKs) for the purpose of inferring the utilization on a given wireless link. In the paper, we show not only the feasibility of leveraging block ACKs for inferring bandwidth but we also demonstrate that such an approach would be viable during the normal WiFi scanning process (e.g. detecting block ACKs during a WiFi scanning sweep looking for nearby APs) is enough time to reasonably infer the available bandwidth.

PASS Updates

[January 29th, 2020] A few interesting updates on what is going on with the work on PASS (Provider Accessible Storage Subsystem) which fits under the broader umbrella of our Redundancy Elimination at the Edge work that is funded by NSF.  A bit more under the hood work but hopefully some fairly neat work down below the break.

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Off to Dublin in June for ICC 2020

[January 27, 2020] Will be off to Dublin, Ireland in June 2020 for ICC 2020 as our paper on using aggregation as an indication of available bandwidth via purely passive estimations was accepted to the CQRM symposium.  If I recall, it was roughly 20 years ago that I went to my first “big” conference attending ICC when it was in Helsinki, Finland.  One out of two papers in on this go round to ICC 2020.  Wicked cool paper by my former Ph. D student Dr. Lixing Song with an assist from my current Ph. D student Al-Amin Mohammed to get it over the finish line.  Bit more on the paper after the break.

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Back from Sabbatical

[January 10th, 2020] Alas, all good things must come to an end and my sabbatical is officially wrapped up as of this Friday with the start of the spring semester this coming week.  This spring, I will be teaching the second iteration of my course on Advanced Wireless Networks and will officially be back on campus full-time at my office in 211B Cushing Hall.

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Sabbatical Update

[November 11th, 2019] Brief update as I am well over halfway through my sabbatical this fall.  Some interesting new projects in the hopper that we will highlight the projects bake a bit more but I can give a bit of a preview of some of the efforts.

  • WiFi Leaf Detection: We are looking how WiFi signals can be used to detect the presence (or lack thereof) leaves on the various trees to help optimize leaf pickup for St. Joseph County (and many other municipalities with burn bans).  Some interesting early work taking our monster WiFi capture rig (all 2.4 GHz channels, all 5 GHz channels) done by Al-Amin Mohammed, the lead graduate student on the project.  Many thanks to our undergraduate REU student Alexandra Berjarano who kicked off this effort this past summer as part of our Wireless Institute REU site.
  • QUIC-enabled FMNC / PASS: We are working on porting our efforts for Fast Mobile Network Characterization (FMNC) and Provider-Assisted Storage Sub-system (PASS) into a unified library riding on QUIC.  This should be an interesting adventure and if successful, a very cool unified platform for measurement that leverage QUIC with legacy support for TCP fallback taking advantage of our older work.
  • Tesserae: Our Tesserae project continues.  Look for some interesting paper updates now that the vast majority of our data collection has wrapped for the effort.

WiFi is Hot!

[September 1, 2018] For each home game at Notre Dame, our group provides WiFi for the University Relations tent on Irish Green.  For a high profile game such as the Michigan game, there are a few more challenges with the crowd density as well as nearby other tests.  Our WiFi gear has been newly re-racked in our WiFi “cart” as you can see below.

The WiFi seemed to fare OK though there are certainly some nice improvements that we can make for the next home game both to the cart as well as how we mount gear to the side of the tent.  More to come over the next few weeks with respect to the WiFi service and general performance estimates as we start to deploy our Fast Mobile Network Characterization app across the tent and various scattered Raspberry Pis in the tent.

Presentation at ICCCN 2018 on FMNC

[August 1st, 2018] Great conference at ICCCN 2018 in Hangzhou, China.  Had a chance to catch up with lots of familiar faces now having attended ICCCN for the past 7 years straight.  Great to meet up with my former student, Qi Liao, who also had a paper at ICCCN.  On Wednesday, I presented our base work on Fast Mobile Network Characterization (FMNC) which was an invited paper at ICCCN.  A really solid work done by my student that has laid the foundation on much of our work in this area.

Download the presentation as a PDF