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CSCE 798 - Independent Study: Designing Adaptive Self-Organizing Wireless Networks

Course Description

This semester, we are investigating the design of an adaptive systems platform called ASOWN using reconfigurable VLSI custom logic.   Given the scope of a semester's course, we will only be scratching the surface, so to speak, on this problem.  This is not so much a study of the theory of wireless networking or investigation of specific wireless research problems per se, but, rather, as it is an excursion into the design of wireless networking components that have more complex functionality and service capabilities than is currently available.  I expect we will have a paper and/or a research proposal to show for our efforts this semester, so our reading of the wireless literature, and the literature on adaptive, agent-oriented systems, as well as our exploration of using reconfigurable VLSI computing architectures and design techniques to create such systems will be geared towards this end.

As wireless networks become large, there are a number of scaling problems which need to be addressed.  Wireless LANs are becoming a means for communities of users to set up ad-hoc networks, to offer services or provide support for military operations.  Operating using unregulated frequencies in the spectrum, wireless LANs using the IEEE 802.11 protocol are easy to set up and manage.  However, there are a number of security, traffic congestion management and resource management issues that need to be addressed if wireless networks based in 802.11 WLANs are to become part of the Internet infrastructure.

We are looking to apply principles of adaptive, self-organizing systems to this problem, and to design some initial solutions using these techniques.  Wireless  LAN nodes constitute a population of individuals that exhibit behaviors defined by a rigid protocol.  What if this protocol were not so rigid, but adaptive, where each wireless station (namely, the MAC layer) were able to learn and adapt to changing conditions in its environment?  What if WLAN stations were able to share more than frame information, but meta-level information governing their internal state and what they have learned from their environment?  Would it be possible to create behaviors in individual wireless nodes such that the behavior of the wireless network as a whole were capable of "intelligence"?  These are the questions we want to answer in this research.  See this ASOWN abstract (taken from the research pre-proposal submitted to the AFRL in August 2002) for more information on this project.

We are embarking on design research to modify the MAC-layer protocol of 802.11, such that we can extend the range of behaviors available to the MAC layer, then subject this set of designs to experimental analysis.  Our interest is seeing whether it is possible for individual MAC nodes to learn from their environment--consisting of conditions of the medium, information shared by surrounding nodes, and information it is able to deduce from its own internal state.  Coupled with my course offerings in VLSI design of 802.11 MAC layer, I will be engaging some of you as well as some of my other students in the task of modifying the protocol and its architecture, and conducting various design extensions, so that the 802.11 MAC can take on a new set of characteristics.

Meeting Times

We will meet in the VLSI & Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory (3D15) on Thursdays from 2-3:30 PM.  Check here to see if there is a change in this schedule.

Reading Materials

Collected here are the reading materials for each of the meetings, along with the ordering of coverage, and the assignment of who is responsible for presenting the paper, its important and relevant points, and who is also responsible for initiating some discussion of contrasting and comparing the paper to what we are doing.  The Date shown in the table below is the date the paper will be read (unless we direct the discussion into side topics that prevent full coverage).  If we can't get through the reading s for a given day, we'll pick them up in our subsequent meeting.  Although a single student is responsible for a given paper, it is expected that all the students will have read the papers and be able to participate in the discussion.

Some of the wireless networking issues that may fall under the purview of adaptive, self-regulating behaviors in the network have to do with (1) capacity management, (2) resource management (specifically when considering power, frame storage buffering, etc.), (3) security and threat management, and (4) traffic routing (specifically the issues associated with ad-hoc, multi-hop routing between nodes). Each of these is--in its own right--a research area unto itself.  However, our interest is not specifically to research these areas but to: (1) identify heuristics, utility functions, and basic behaviors that specific nodes in the network--and the network as an entity itself--might need to adopt in order to adapt under a variety of unpredictable operating conditions, and (2)