In this work, we draw from our research and industry experience in the design of networked systems and define research directions that can simplify management and better exploit network infrastructure. We introduce problems both on data and control planes related to the design of a single network element and network-wide behaviors. In particular, we consider efficient representations of packet classifiers, expressive implementations of buffer management policies, the composition of heterogeneous control planes, network virtualization, and extension of the network stack to support interactive applications. For the considered research directions outlined here, we formulate problems that, we believe, are important in the design of network systems. The purpose of this work to attract system researchers to specific problems introduced in this paper.
Speaker's Bio : During the last decade (2000-2012) Kirill worked as a Technical Leader at Cisco Systems. During this time he gained enough theoretical and practical experience that he formalized in his Ph.D at Ben-Gurion University (Israel) under the guidance of Prof. Michael Segal (BGU) and Dr. Alex Kesselman (Google) that he did during (2008-2012). During 2012 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo (Canada), where he worked with Prof. Srinivasan Keshav and Prof. Alejandro Lopez-Ortiz, and later at the Purdue University (USA), where he worked with Prof. Patrick Eugster.

We study the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL)'s performance under packet drop attacks. We consider an external jamming attacker who can selectively interfere with traffic around a targeted router. We show that existing RPL's implementation allows such an attacker to keep dropping packets forwarded by the attacked router forever, if there is no end-to-end feedback scheme. To counter such attacks, we analyze the additional measures that need to be built into RPL. In particular, we compare the effectiveness of measures at the attacked router against measures at affected children nodes. Furthermore, we propose that RPL's parent switching decision should distinguish between two cases, i.e., switching due to the deterioration of the current parent and switching due to the appearance of a better alternative. We evaluate the performance of our enhanced RPL under packet drop attacks and show that our enhancement can significantly reduce the fraction of packets being dropped over a prolonged period of time.
Speaker's Bio : Binbin Chen is a Senior Research Scientist at Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC). His research focuses on improving the design of complex interconnected systems (e.g., cyber-physical systems and IoT systems), so that such systems can become more efficient and more secure, yet still remain as simple as they can. Prior to joining ADSC, he obtained his PhD from National University of Singapore (NUS) and his Bachelor from Peking University, both in Computer Science. His research has received several awards, including the Best Paper Award in ACM SIGCOMM conference 2010.

This paper summarizes recent results on interference management and backhaul design in wireless networks via a degrees of freedom (DoF) analysis. A $-user interference network with coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission is considered first, under backhaul load constraints that limit the cooperation between the basestation transmitters. The per user DoF is characterized for locally connected linear interference networks and then extended to the more practical hexagonal sectored cellular networks. For the studied network models, by allowing for CoMP transmission and a flexible message assignment that is constrained by an average backhaul load, one can deliver the rate gains promised by information-theoretic upper bounds with practical one-shot zero-forcing schemes that incur little or no additional load on the backhaul. The DoF gains are then characterized for the downlink of a two-layered heterogeneous hexagonal cellular network with macro base stations (MB), small cell base stations (SB) that act as half duplex analog relays, and mobile terminals (MT). The first layer is a point-to-multipoint wireless backhaul between macro base stations and small cell base stations, and the second layer is the transmission layer between SBs and MTs. The two layers are assumed to use the same time/frequency resources for communication, thus limiting the maximum achievable per user DoF in the system to half, due to the half-duplex nature of the SBs. The proposed schemes are simple zero forcing schemes that employ joint processing and achieve cooperation similar to the single-layer K-user network but without overloading the wireless backhaul. This is achieved by sending an appropriate linear combination of users' messages from the MBs to the SBs that zero force the interference at the MTs. The achievable schemes exploit the half-duplexity of the SBs in the system and schedule the SBs and MTs to be active in different time-slots to reduce the interference. In particular, it is shown that the optimal per user DoF of half can be approached in a hexagonal sectored cellular network using only zero forcing schemes.
Speaker's Bio : Venugopal V. Veeravalli received the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the M.S. degree in 1987 from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and the B. Tech. degree in 1985 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, (Silver Medal Honors), all in Electrical Engineering. He joined University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000, where he is currently the Henry Magnuski Professor in the ECE Department. He is also affiliated with the Department of Statistics, Coordinated Science Laboratory , and Information Trust Institute. He served as a Director of the Illinois Center for Wireless Systems (ICWS) during 2007-2015. He served as a program director for communications research at the U.S. National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA during 2003-2005. He was assistant professor in the ECE department at Cornell University during 1996-2000. Professor Veeravalli's research interests include machine learning, statistical signal processing, detection and estimation theory, information theory, and stochastic control, with applications to data science, sensor networks, cyberphysical systems, and wireless communications.

The paper answers a fundamental question: can the accuracy of Wi-Fi based fingerprinting be significantly increased by fusing information from alternate sources like LTE signals and magnetometers, both commonly available in IoT devices and smartphones? Further, it aims to eliminate dependency of well established localization techniques on only Wi-Fi access point (AP) positions, and instead, proposes a diversity-leveraging architecture called as the Wireless Locator (Wi-LO) framework. Wi-LO is a client-server paradigm for indoor localization that achieves precision by pattern-matching the collected samples with a priori references for each information source separately, thus giving a stand-alone decision for these diverse sensing modes. The novelty of the paper is fusing these decision outcomes and resolving mismatches (for e.g., Wi-Fi and LTE suggest different locations) in a seamless manner, and also identifying the best source to use at each location based on its spatial resolution. Wi-Lo is rigorously evaluated on a test-bed, with the proposed scheme of combining Wi-Fi, LTE and magnetometer performing better localization than the classical Wi-Fi-only approach in both urban (+8%) and rural (+25%) scenarios.
Speaker's Bio : Kaushik Roy Chowdhury is Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University and Faculty Fellow of the College of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2009 and M.S. from the University of Cincinnati in 2006. Prof. Chowdhury is the winner of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2017, the Office of Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015. He is the recipient of best paper awards at the IEEE Intl. Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2013, 2012 and 2009 and Intl. Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC) in 2013. He serves as area editor for Elsevier Computer Networks Journal and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He is Sr. Member of the IEEE and the academic outreach director for the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research project office, a joint $100 million public-private partnership between the NSF and wireless industry consortium to create city-scale testing platforms.

The attractiveness of TV white space spectrum for last mile access has been recognized before. In this paper, we draw attention to its potential for enabling low cost middle mile connectivity to the Internet backbone. In particular, we examine the amount and nature of TVWS spectrum available towards this end, considering a representative rural setting in the UK, TV transmitter deployment configuration, terrain information and antenna type. We find that cumulative interference from multiple nearby TV transmitters can severely reduce the amount of TVWS spectrum available and also heavily fragment it. However, the use of directional antennas, as would be the case for backhaul links, negates this effect and suggests the possibility of high speed TVWS backhaul links via spectrum aggregation.
Speaker's Bio : Mahesh K Marina has been at Edinburgh since November 2006. Previously, he worked as a research staff member in the Computer Science department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as part of the Mobile Systems Laboratory headed by Prof. Rajive Bagrodia. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in August 2004 from State University of New York at Stony Brook, where his advisor was Prof. Samir Das. Earlier, He obtained an M. S. (Computer Science) degree from The University of Texas at San Antonio in December 1999, and a B. Tech. (Computer Science & Engineering) degree from the Regional Engineering College (now, National Institute of Technology), Warangal, India in May 1998.

Internet-of-Things is expected to increase the number of connected devices to billions. The major share of these devices will not be user operated, rather they will be machines communicating with other machines without any human intervention. In M2M communication, the network access to such high density of M2M devices is real bottleneck because of limited spectrum. The unlicensed spectrum is affordable choice for M2M networks but presence of existing technologies like Wi-Fi makes network access even more difficult problem to address.
Speaker's Bio : Dr. Biplab Sikdar received the B. Tech degree in electronics and communication engineering from North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India, M. Tech degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and Ph.D in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA in 1996, 1998 and 2001, respectively. His research interests include wireless MAC protocols, transport protocols, network security and queuing theory. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Intel Corporation and WiMAX Forum. Dr. Sikdar is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi and served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2007-2012.

The ubiquity of toys viz-a-viz children and their close relationship have been leveraged by academics and industry alike to provide applications and services through these toys. Many domains such as healthcare, medical intervention, entertainment, education have all benefited from smart toys which could sense their context and/or perform actuation tasks such as conversations, support etc. However, state-of-the-art toy systems lack connected-yet-autonomous behavior and hence are unable to perform coordinated tasks which could facilitate complex interactions especially in education. Few such activities that require complex multi-toy coordination and interaction are teaching social skills such as social etiquettes, morals and group conversations; as well as cognitive skills such as counting, pattern identification, grouping etc. This paper is a first effort towards generating interest and discussion around this interesting area of using multiple connected toys for learning. In this paper, we propose Puppeteer, a decentralized orchestrator platform to enable coordinated yet autonomous multi-toy behavior which provides seamless coordination between toys, and a declarative mechanism to author and adapt learning scenarios for enactment. We evaluate this system through simulations and real-world prototype experiments, and report its performance.
Speaker's Bio : Prasenjit Dey is a Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research. He works in the area of cognitive education which tries to make education, learning, and tutoring smarter, and highly contextual. He received his Ph.D. (2004) in communications engineering from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, on a EPFL Doctoral School Fellowship Award and a M.Tech. (1998) in communications engineering from IIT, Delhi, India, on a Samsung Fellowship Award. His current interests are in the areas of information theory, signal processing, and pattern recognition in the context of multimodal systems. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Networks and network architectures are constantly evolving, manifesting in new developments such as SDN, P4, and 400G Ethernet. These novel paradigms and technologies require network researchers to investigate and to adapt their measurement facilities. We present two tools which can foster this process. The first tool, pos, supports a fully automated workflow for performing and evaluating network experiments. One of its key features is the testbed orchestration to maintain and recreate a specified network test environment gaining reproducible experiment results. The second tool, libmoon, is a user-friendly userspace packet processing framework based on DPDK. Among many other projects, libmoon powers MoonGen, a dedicated packet generator in broad use by the community. MoonGen's hardware-supported generation and measurement capabilities are central to our network experiments to reliably recreate measurements. Further, a survey of scientific publications and applications presents projects based on both libmoon and MoonGen. We argue that combining pos and libmoon/MoonGen creates an ideal platform for network experiments. This platform offers an affordable price, high flexibility, ease of use and generation of reproducible experiments.
Speaker's Bio : Prof. Carle’s research field is internet technology, specializing in future internet, network security, sensor networks, real-time communication and autonomous networks. Prof. Carle (b. 1965) studied electrical engineering at the University of Stuttgart (graduated in 1992). He spent periods abroad at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris and Brunel University in London, where he acquired a Master of Science in digital systems. In 1996, he completed his doctorate at the University of Karlsruhe’s Institute of Telematics. He was supported by a scholarship from the “Beherrschbarkeit komplexer Systeme” (manageability of complex systems) research training group. In 1997, he received an EU scholarship to study at the Institut Eurécom at Sophia Antipolis in France. At the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) in Berlin, he headed up the “Global Networking” competence center. In December 2002, he was appointed to the University of Tübingen’s newly-created Chair of Computer Networks and Internet. In April 2008, he moved to TUM. He has been managing director of the Institute of Computer Science since April 2010.

This paper provides a high-level overview of the impact of projected population growth on urban living, and the challenges facing our increasingly crowded cities. We will highlight recent technological advances which can be used to address these challenges, then review specific opportunities including both current use cases for these technologies, as well as future applications based on projected capabilities.
Speaker's Bio : Raghunath Nambiar helps define strategies for next generation architectures, systems, and datacenter solutions, as well as leads a team of engineers and product leaders focused on emerging technologies and solutions – big data, analytics, internet of things and artificial intelligence. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, 10 books in Lecture Series in Computer Science (LNCS), and holds five patents with several pending. Prior to Cisco, Raghu was an architect at Hewlett-Packard responsible for several industry-first and disruptive technology solutions and a decade of performance benchmark leadership. He holds master’s degrees from University of Massachusetts and Goa University and completed an advanced management program from Stanford University.

This paper proposes a formal framework for capturing context for enterprise tasks with the aim to provide contextual awareness about business-critical events to enterprise decision-makers at the point of decision-making. Contextual awareness can enhance business intelligence by providing critical insights about why questions around enterprise data. It exploits enterprise social intelligence to gradually improve the quality of recommendations.
Speaker's Bio : Dr. Lipika Dey, Prinicipal Scientist, TCS Innovation Labs, New Delhi Dr. Dey graduated with an Integrated M.Sc. in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, and holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and Data Processing. A PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, her interest areas include text data analytics, information fusion, machine learning, and data mining

This paper focusses on the societal challenges related to Digital Inclusion. It revisits the 5G mobile communication objectives, and states the need for digital inclusion for all. Special focus is put on the entry into the digital society, including both discussion on key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as health information as the starting point for digital development. Main focus of this paper lies on the proof of the Internet light concept of free provision of information in developing economies. Both, the results from the first pilots in The Democratic Republik of Congo (DRC), and the ongoing installations of Internet light hotspots in Tanzania support the objective of sustainable business operation with free access to information for all, thus fostering digital inclusion.
Speaker's Bio : Josef Noll is professor at the University of Oslo in the area of Mobile Services. His group ConnectedLife concentrates on the working areas mobile-based trust and authentication, personalised and context-aware service provisioning, and the evolution towards beyond 3G systems. He is also Senior Advisor in Movation, Norway's open innovation company for mobile services. He is also representative of MobileMonday Norway, the community for nerds and professionals in mobile services. Previously he was Senior Advisor at Telenor R&I in the Products and Markets group, and project leader of Eurescom's 'Broadband services in the Intelligent Home' and use-case leader in the EU FP6 'Adaptive Services Grid (ASG)' projects, and has initiated a.o. the EU's 6th FP ePerSpace and several Eurescom projects. He joined UNIK in 2005, and Telenor R&D in 1997, coming from the European Space Agency, where he was staff member (1993-1997) in the Electromagnetics Division of ESA ESTEC. He received his Dipl.-Ing. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bochum in 1985 and 1993. He worked as a Integrated Circuit Designer in 1985 with SIEMENS in Munich, Germany and returned to the Institute for Radio-frequency at the University of Bochum as a Research Assistant from 1986 - 1990.

We discuss next-gen immersive experiences, specifically augmented reality and virtual reality, and 5G’s role in making them possible. 5G is envisioned to bring higher capacity, a uniform experience, and lower latency—all of which are critical for AR and VR applications over a wireless network—while also reducing the cost per bit. This presentation will outline four examples of AR and VR requiring 5G to empower new user experiences and improve existing ones as the number of users increases.
Speaker's Bio : Ajit Rao has a B.Tech. (ECE, IIT Madras, 1992), MS & Ph.D. (EE, machine learning, UC Santa Barbara, 1998). He was an early employee of voice coding start-up SignalCom, acquired by Microsoft. Ajit worked on Windows Media Audio at Microsoft until 2002 when he moved to Texas Instruments, India. In TI, he grew and led the team that built multimedia codecs for all of TI's platforms including OMAP and DaVinci. He was also systems architect for TI's very complex Netra chip. In 2011, Ajit was also a volunteer technologist (biometrics) on India's ambitious 'Aadhaar' project which has > 1.1B users now. Subsequently, he co-founded and led technology for social video streaming startup, Vivaldi. Vivaldi's app Stringo was among the top 20 apps on the Android App Store (Social) in 2013. Ajit is a co-author on 12 issued US patents and 30+ technical publications in the areas of virtual reality, embedded systems, multimedia and machine learning.