Networks and Mobile Systems

Networks and Mobile Systems

Overview
The NMS group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory conducts research in many areas of networking: wireless networks, Internet architecture and protocols, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, sensor networks, network security, and networked systems. The group was formed in 1998.
Current projects
CarTel: a mobile sensor network system developing vehicular network protocols, software, and services.
Wireless network coding: practical techniques using network coding to improve wireless network throughput.
Bit-switched wireless networks: using cross-layer confidence information (SoftPHY) from the physical layer to design better higher-layer wireless network protocols.
Combating wireless interference: new techniques to overcome wireless interference.
AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol): self-certifying Internet addresses + new protocols to provide accountability and improve Internet security.
WaveScope: a sensor computing system for high data-rate applications. Unfortunately, the above list might be a bit out-of-date. The NMS papers page has a more current list of papers.
Some past projects
Internet architecture, overlay and P2P networksP2P and overlay networks
Chord: a scalable and robust distributed hash table (DHT) enabling key-value lookups.
Project IRIS: A multi-institution NSF ITR collaboration that developed the network and system infrastructure for resilient Internet services using DHTs. Our work included:
Dynamic evolution of P2P systems: The amount of work required to maintain good connectivity depends on the "half-life" of a P2P system.
SFR (Semantic-Free Referencing), a reference (name) resolution service for linked systems.
DOA (Delegation-Oriented Architecture), an extension to the Internet architecture that accommodates "middleboxes" in an architecturally coherent way using a new delegation primitive.
DQE (Distributed Quota Enforcement), a spam control system.
Speak-up, a defense against application-level DDoS attacks.
RON (Resilient Overlay Networks): Improving availability and resilience of Internet paths using application-controlled overlay routing.
MONET: Multi-homed overlay network of web proxies to route around network failures for Web applications. Congestion control, traffic engineering
XCP (eXplicit Congestion Control) and TeXCP: Congestion control for high bandwidth-delay product networks and responsive traffic engineering.
CM (Congestion Manager), an integrated end-to-end congestion management architecture and congestion control algorithms for the future Internet.
OxygenTV: rate adaptation and error control for MPEG-4 delivery. Internet routing
rcc and correct Internet routing: tools to improve routing correctness and experimental studies of Internet routing and failures.
R-BGP: Improving Internet routing connectivity.
BGPSep: Constructing correct and scalable iBGP configurations. Network measurement
DNS analysis: trace-based analysis of DNS performance and caching.
M&M tools: multiQ and mystery, passive measurement tools suitable for large scale studies of Internet path characteristics
Routing analysis: BGP measurements.
Wireless, mobile, and sensor networks
Cricket: An accurate indoor location system. (Now commercially available.)
SMART (Scalable Medical Alert and Response Technologies) and the Patient-Centric Network: networking and systems infrastructure for health-care facilities.
INS is an intentional naming system for scalable and dynamic resource discovery. Twine aims to make INS scalable to large networks using peer-to-peer lookups, built on top of Chord.
Migrate, an end-to-end architecture for Internet host mobility, support for suspend/resume operations for mobile network applications to handle disconnections, and server failover.
Harnessing multiple radios and access points
FatVAP: Aggregating AP backhaul bandwidth.
Horde: networking software that allows an application to stripe data from multiple streams across a set of dissimilar wireless network channels.
Divert: a multi-radio, fine-grained path selection system for improving throughput in wireless LANs.
APware: improving performance and robustness for multi-rate wireless LANs.
Fusion: Mitigating congestion in wireless sensor networks.
BSD (Bounded SlowDown), Span, LEACH and Spin: energy-efficient protocols for wireless and sensor networks
Spectrumware: new algorithms for radio and wireless physical layers for implementation on a flexible software platform. (Now commercially available.)
Blueware, protocols for internetworking with Bluetooth.
Network security
Kill-Bots: Surviving application-layer botnet attacks that mimic flash crowds.
Real-Time anomaly detection: Improving network security with real-time scanning and worm detection.
Speak-up, a defense against application-level DDoS attacks using bandwidth as a "currency".
DQE (Distributed Quota Enforcement), a spam control system.
Securing SSH from address harvesting attacks.
Infranet: circumventing Web censorship and surveillance.
RoboNorm: Efficient and robust TCP stream normalization.
Distributed data management, stream processing
Medusa: Distributed data stream processing.
HRDB: Database fault-tolerance with heterogeneous replication.