Wireless Technology: Seamless Multitier Wireless Networks for Multimedia Applications

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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.