Introduction
WORKIT, the Wireless Open Research Kit, is a development tool that allows researchers to build wireless platforms for researching wireless protocols.
People
Mesh Module
The UCSB team has initiated the design and development of a multi-radio mesh module comprising a routing solution based on AODV-ST, as well as mesh auto-configuration, monitoring and visualization support. Efforts to port the AODV-ST routing module onto the WORKIT Soekris kit platform are now in progress while the main thrust of the team’s efforts to date has been on the monitoring software. The main accomplishments are:
- Developed a wireless network monitoring component including: a) the ability to accurately record measurements by collecting statistics directly from the registers exposed by the madwifi wireless device driver; b) the ability to proactively inject data and control frames into the network in order to evaluate the health of the network; and c) a graphical interface that shows real-time statistics collected by the monitoring software (in the form of time-series, simple averages, moving average, standard deviations, and percentiles). This tool facilitates quick and easy configuration of the monitoring tools in different wireless networks - especially in transient networks such as the IETF where network setup changes often.
- Tested the network monitoring component at the 67th IETF meeting in San Diego. The wireless network setup consisted of 38 APs, each with one IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11a radio. Over 1000 members of the IETF community attended this meeting and majority of them had at least one wireless device. We used our monitoring software to record traffic and collect statistics from the wireless device drives, on 4 days of this meeting. We collected data-traces from both the IEEE 802.11a as well as the IEEE 802.11g network. We used the graphical statistic tools to ensure that useful data was being collected at all times. The monitoring software also injected data frames into the network and recorded fine-scale transmission logs for each frame. These logs will be used to analyze the impact of congestion on frame transmissions.
- Analyzed data traces collected at the IETF meeting in several ways: 1) By evaluating the control overhead within the wireless network, we determined that a large volume of control traffic in the wireless medium has a detrimental impact on the performance of clients and APs; 2) By analyzing the impact of a few security-related 'attacks' on the performance of wireless clients and APs, we got insights into the design of techniques that can thwart such attacks and mitigate their impact; and 3) By evaluating injected data frame logs we studied the impact of network congestion and medium contention on the performance received by a client in the network, helping us design future protocols that allow clients to adapt to different network conditions and therefore receive good performance.
- Developed a wireless 'sniffing fidelity' tool to help determine the suitability of a location in a wireless network for sniffing useful traces. By recording short samples of the traffic sent by surrounding wireless stations at different sniffing locations, the tool evaluates and compares traffic statistics (e.g., traffic volume, number of frames received and missed by the sniffer) to help select the most suitable locations for collecting useful data-traces from a wireless network.
Publications
- Krishna Ramachandran, Irfan Sheriff, Elizabeth Belding, and Kevin Almeroth. Routing Stability in Static Wireless Mesh Networks. Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) Workshop, Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium, April 2007.
- Krishna N. Ramachandran, Elizabeth M. Belding, Kevin C. Almeroth and Milind M. Buddhikot. Interference-Aware Channel Assignment in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks. Proceedings of Infocom 2006, Barcelona, Spain, April 2006.
- Krishna Ramachandran, Milind M. Buddhikot, Girish Chandranmenon, Scott Miller, Elizabeth Belding-Royer and Kevin Almeroth. On the Design and Implementation of Infrastructure Mesh Networks. Proceedings of WiMesh 2005, Santa Clara, CA, October 2005.
- Krishna Ramachandran, Kevin Almeroth and Elizabeth Belding-Royer. A Novel Framework for the Management of Large-scale Wireless Network Testbeds. Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Wireless Networks Measurements (WinMee), Trentino, Italy, April 2005.
- Amit Jardosh, Kimaya Mittal, Krishna N. Ramachandran, Elizabeth M. Belding and Kevin Almeroth. IQU: Practical Queue-based User Association Management for WLANs. Proceedings of MobiCom, Los Angeles, CA, September 2006.
- Amit P. Jardosh, Krishna N. Ramachandran, Kevin C. Almeroth and Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer.Understanding Congestion in IEEE 802.11b Wireless Networks. Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference, Berkeley, CA, October 2005.
- Amit P. Jardosh, Krishna N. Ramachandran, Kevin C. Almeroth and Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer.Understanding Link-Layer Behavior in Highly Congested IEEE 802.11b Wireless Networks. Proceedings of E-WIND, Philadelphia, PA, August 2005.
- Henrik Lundgren, Krishna Ramachandran, Elizabeth Belding-Royer, Kevin Almeroth, Michael Benny, Andrew Hewatt, Alexander Touma and Amit Jardosh.Experiences from the Design, Deployment, and Usage of the UCSB MeshNet Testbed. IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, April 2006.
Software
Links
