Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Wireless Network Health: An Adaptation a Day Keeps the System Administrator Away

Abstract

Some day in the future, we will look back at the shared medium, best effort, unmanaged environments that characterize today's wireless networks and find it difficult to believe that anything was really accomplished in such a disorganized and chaotic environment. These networks currently experience few barriers to deployment, and as a result they are often deployed in a manner such that the performance is not well understood or anticipated. Aggravating this scenario is lack of operator-friendly monitoring and diagnosis tools and the inability of wireless devices to perceive a problem and then autonomously attempt to find a cure. The focus of this talk is to motivate and then describe the need for wireless networks to evolve, to use intelligent, adaptive protocols and management solutions. This talk will describe our attempts to understand the current state of affairs in wireless networks and to identify solutions that solve some of the numerous problems and inefficiencies. More specifically, how should we monitor, analyze, and understand the complex interaction between large numbers of mobile nodes in wireless environments? How can we bring intelligence to network devices such that operators and the devices themselves can better interpret detected anomalies? With the acceleration in wireless network deployments, these issues are of critical importance to the health of our networks.

Biography

Elizabeth M. Belding is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Elizabeth's research focuses on mobile networks, specifically mesh networks, multimedia, monitoring, rural mesh networks, and advanced service support. She is the founder of the Mobility Management and Networking (MOMENT) Laboratory at UCSB. Elizabeth is the author of over 70 papers related to mobile networking and has served on over 50 program committees for networking conferences. Elizabeth served as the TPC Co-Chair of ACM MobiCom 2005 and ACM MobiHoc 2007. She also served on the editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Elizabeth is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, and a 2002 Technology Review 100 award, awarded to the world's top young investigators. See http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ebelding/ for further details.