Networks and Mobile Systems Final Year Projects

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Unfortunately, the above list might be a bit out-of-date.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 networks

P2P 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.