Innovative Information Dessimination in Ad Hoc Networks with Network Coding

Contact: Alaeddine Elfawal

In the scope of European project Haggle (http://www.cambridge.intel-research.net/haggle/) and in collaboration with Intel, Cambridge University and other partners we are interested in new paradigms in networking enabling opportunistic communication in wireless networks without any infrastructure and only intermittent connectivity. With such hypothesis classical routing based approach cannot work and new communications schemes should be developped. One solution that is gaining a lot of interests is coming from multi-user information theory and is named “Network Coding”. In this approach a node is not simply forwarding received packets following routing paths but will combine received packets from different nodes into a linear combination with random coefficient and broadcast it to its neighboors. At reception a node receives these different linear combination and solve the correponding system of linear equation to figure out the packets that have been mixed. This approach is known to have better resilience to changes due to intermittence and node mobility, and to reach higher throughput than classical approaches. We have developped in the past couple of months in Java a Distributed Bulletin Board application based on network coding in Java. In this application a message typed over one node is to be received by all other nodes. We have also developped a simulation platform based on EMSTAR for this application. We wish now to extend our system to other scenarios and study its performances.

  • We wish to extend the actual platform to make it a versatile and flexible platform able to be reconfigured to implemented different applications in different scenarios. For this purpose we are searching a MSc student interested in software development in wireless networks. The work will be situated at the crossing between networking, distributed systems and autonomous systems. The candidate is expected to have good background in these topics.

Benefits: Exposure to an exciting project, jointly with Intel, Cambridge University and other partners in Haggle (http://www.cambridge.intel-research.net/haggle/).

Domain:

Network performance analysis; Other; Protocol design and implementation