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.

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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Advanced Wireless Networks

[October 15th, 2018] I will be teaching a course in the spring on Advanced Wireless Networks.  Should be an interesting run through basic networking, basic wireless, and WiFi / cellular with a few dashes of MANET (ad hoc), D2D, and low power.  The class will be offered at the graduate level only though undergraduates are welcome to inquire.  The class is primarily targeted at CSE and EE graduate students.  Will be a nice time for me personally to shore up a broader perspective on the various 3GPP releases outside of what occasional expert work here and there entails. Synopsis for the class is below:

The focus of this course will be to explore a complete stack view of the key challenges associated with wireless networks across a variety of contexts including: wireless fundamentals, historical and contemporary wireless standards, WiFi, cellular, low power, and device-to-device / ad hoc networks.  The course will explore seminal and contemporary research papers with a focus on the systems and performance aspects of wireless networking.  The course will culminate in experimentally-focused research projects utilizing wireless technologies.

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.