Wireless Technology: Seamless Multitier Wireless Networks for Multimedia Applications

在过去的十年中，移动的和无线通信服务的用户数量以指数速度增长。 同时，新兴的无线设备已经实现了超越传统蜂窝语音的新的通信模式。 然而，为了保持持续的“连接”，用户面临着手动协调大量混乱的服务、设备和无线技术的令人沮丧的任务。该项目的目标是开发一个平台，用于在整个环境中进行真正的无缝通信，就像高速室内无线和传统蜂窝系统一样。研究人员建议设计，构建和评估RENE（Rice Everywhere NETwork），这是一个多层系统，使用单个网络接口卡提供网络和应用程序级服务。 RENE项目的主要创新点如下：1.设计了一种新型的网络接口卡mNIC（multi-tier Network Interface Card）， 可根据不同的物理层和网络层标准进行实时重新编程。 mNIC将支持 在层内水平地和在层之间垂直地进行软缓冲，包括从 原型100 Mbps室内无线局域网协议的商业CDMA蜂窝标准。构建一个代理文件系统，使用户能够无缝和一致地访问家庭工作 环境，独立于用户的位置或可用的网络资源。 系统会响应 使用代码转换器来适应可用容量的变化，允许文件的一致阅读和写入（即使在代码转换时），并促进未修改的应用程序中的网络感知。研究人员将使用以下方法对代理流量进行广泛的测量和建模研究： 多重分形模型 使用这些结果，将制定政策，使代理， 关于何时以及在何种程度上对用户数据进行转码或存储以最好地满足用户需求的智能决策 业绩目标。开发了一种新的粗粒度资源预留和准入控制方法， 使用户能够在多层环境中获得可预测的性能。 关键技术是 将系统资源抽象到虚拟瓶颈小区的网络中， 虚拟小区，服务质量目标可以在实际系统中得到满足。2这项研究将与诺基亚和德州仪器合作进行，以建立一个完整的原型实现RENE系统，并证明其能力。

In the past decade, the number of subscribers to mobile and wireless communication services has grown at an exponential rate. Concurrently, emerging wireless devices have enabled new modes of communication beyond traditional cellular voice. However, to remain continually "connected," users face the frustrating task of manually coordinating a vast disarray of services, devices, and wireless technologies.The goal of this project is to develop a platform for truly seamless communication throughout environments as fundamentally different as high-speed indoor wireless and conventional cellular systems. The investigators propose to design, build, and evaluate RENE (Rice Everywhere NEtwork), a multi-tier system that provides network- and application-level services using a single network interface card. The key innovations of the RENE project are as follows:1. The design of an mNIC (multi-tier Network Interface Card), a novel network interface card that is reprogrammable on-the-fly to different physical- and network-layer standards. The mNIC will support soft handoffs, both horizontally within a tier and vertically among tiers, including transitions from a prototype 100 Mbps indoor wireless LAN protocol to commercial CDMA cellular standards.2. The building of a proxy file system that enables seamless and consistent access to a user's home working environment, independent of the user's location or available network resources. The system will respond to changes in available capacity using transcoders, allow consistent reading and writing of files (even when transcoded), and facilitate network-awareness in unmodified applications.3. The investigators will perform an extensive measurement and modeling study of proxy traffic using multi-fractal models. Using these results, policies will be devised which enable the proxy to make intelligent decisions on when and to what extent to transcode or store user data to best meet user performance objectives.4. The development of a new coarse-grained approach to resource reservation and admission control that enables users to obtain predictable performance in multi-tier environments. The key technique is to abstract system resources into networks of virtual bottleneck cells such that by provisioning resources in the virtual cells, quality of service objectives can be satisfied in the actual system.This research will be conducted in collaboration with Nokia and Texas Instruments in order to build a complete prototype implementation of the RENE system and demonstrate its capabilities.