Developing distributed algorithms for the proximate internet

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The proximate Internet is a network of mobile/fixed devices in which devices can discover and interact with those that are within their vicinity. The primary objective of the proximate Internet is to connect us to the local physical world around us. The proximate Internet has numerous applications including social networking, mobile advertising, and controlling devices remotely. Consider situations where we are in a neighborhood searching for a Japanese restaurant, hailing an available taxi, wondering if a friend is close by, willing to receive sale or job advertisements, wishing to interact with a nearby person, or requiring to control nearby devices. These are only a few examples where proximity matters, hence we can greatly benefit from the proximate Internet. The current centralized and distributed solutions for the proximate Internet, including WAN-GPS, and WiFi and Bluetooth based approaches, pose challenges for managing energy consumption, scaling with the number of devices, and users' privacy. For example, in the WAN-GPS based approach, devices determine their location using GPS and communicate their location to a "God-Box". In return, the "God-Box" informs devices of nearby mobiles and services. This raises the privacy concerns with God-Box tracking everyone. The solution to the proximate Internet that we consider in this research proposal is a multi-hop wireless ad hoc network, in which all communications are only among nearby devices and the density of devices can be very high. In this proposal, we focus on designing energy efficient distributed algorithms for major operations in the proximate Internet, including neighbor discovery and paging, and use several techniques such as analog network coding, smart antennas and multi-channel utilization to make these operations fast, reliable and efficient in terms of bandwidth and energy consumption. The proposed research will be carried out in collaboration with graduate students and undergraduate research assistants.