Wireless & Mobile Networking

Wireless Mesh Networks : The goal of this study is to design new architectures for multi-hop ad-hoc wireless networks based on extending the 802.11 technology. We have introduced the concept of a "wireless router" with efficient means for packet forwarding between multiple wireless interfaces using a combination of MPLS labels and extensions to 802.11 medium access. This can be used as a building block for  a city-wide or campus-wide multi-hop wireless network. In addition, we have significantly extended the 802.11 protocol to support a "multi-cellular" architecture which encourages simultaneous transmissions in neighboring cells of a multi-hop wireless network.

Representative Publication :

NSF ORBIT Project : This is a joint academia/industry project funded by the NSF for $5.4 million for 4years for building a testbed for next-generation wireless networks along with  a set of experimental packages. Participants include Rutgers/Winlab, Columbia  and Princeton from academia and IBM Research, Bell Labs and Thomson Multimedia from the industry.

IBM's participation  consists of two experimental packages:

• Ad hoc Networking in 802.11 WLAN Scenarios
• Peer-to-peer infrastructure for VoIP and IM with cooperative multi-hop MAC

 

Representative Publication :

Enabling SIP-based Session Setup in Ad Hoc Networks. N. Banerjee, A. Acharya, S. Das. ACM/Baltzer Journal of Wireless Networks (WINET), special issue on Broadband Wireless Multimedia. June 2006. (IBM Technical Report RC RC23270)

Further details on the ORBIT project is available here

Public Wireless LAN / Airconn:

The goal of the ts-PWLAN (tiered services - Public Wireless LAN) project was to define an architecture and prototype for enabling pay-per-use Internet access at 802.11 hotspots, at multiple tiers of service. ts-PWLAN provides for dynamic renegotiations of tiers of services and enabled multiple billing modes, e.g. based on connectivity time and usage.

Representative Publication :

airConn : A framework for tiered services in public wireless LAN hot-spots. IEEE Communications, Sept 2004. A. Acharya, C. Bisdikian,  Young-Bae Ko  and A. Misra. (Paper)

:Issued Patent :

Network-layer enforcement of differentiated connectivity for public wireless internet access. Co-inventors :J. Gomez-castellan, Y. Ko, C. Bisdikian, M.C. Rosu, A. Misra. China Patent ZL02828494.1, July '07.

e911: Location determination using cellular and/or 802.11 system

This was a ODIS project (On Demand Innovation Services) with IGS (IBM Global Services) for an university looking to provide e911 services within the campus. Location resolution for e911 (e.g. 67% of the calls within 100m and 95% of the calls within 300 meters for network-based solutions) is not sufficient for in-building coverage where room-level location resolution is desirable. This is especially true for emergency services. In addition, the requirement from the customer was a call-back feature to the caller.

We proposed a solution using 802.11 based location determination system and coupling that with VoIP. Customer's existing deployment of 802.11 access points in the campus buildings was leveraged to determine a user's position. The user device is any 802.11 based device with a (VoIP) softphone capability. When the user dials 911 on the softphone, the call handling is coupled with a 802.11 based location determination to determine the location of the 911 caller. [2004]