Course Overview

The goal of this semi-informal seminar series is to acquaint participants with some of the fundamental concepts and state-of-the-art research in the areas of mobile computing and wireless networking. Focus will be on the computer science issues in mobile computing. There are no formal requirements except a gentleman's understanding to read the assigned papers and participate in potentially heated discussions. The format of the course will consist of weekly discussions.

The seminar shall run for 6 weeks (maybe 8) and about 2-3 papers a week will be assigned from the list in each section. Where possible, papers selected shall be overviews and magazine articles which are rich in insight. NOTE: It is humanly impossible to cover all the papers listed below in one summer, so please do NOT be intimidated. I have listed them for people who may find particular topics interesting and want to pursue a sub-area further.

General Information

Discussions: Tuesdays or Thursdays, location and time, TBD.

Moderator: Prof. Emmanuel Agu, FL-139, 508-831-5568, emmanuel@cs.wpi.edu
Office Hours: Monday, Tuesday and Friday: 2:00PM - 3:00PM, Thursday 3:00PM - 4:00PM; Others by appointment

Text: There will be no text for this class. Selected papers will be assigned from the computer graphics literature. Please see bibliography (schedule) section below. Other relevant papers may be suggested. The following books may also be helpful:

• Toh C-K, "Ad Hoc Mobile and Wireless Networks", Prentice-Hall, 2002
• Pahlavan and Krishnamurthy, "Principles of Wireless Networks", Prentice-Hall, 2002
• Lin and Chlamtac, "Wireless and Mobile Network Architectures", John Wiley and Sons, 2002
• Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks (4th Edition)", Prentice-Hall 2002

Class Websites: The class website is at http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~emmanuel/courses/mobile_computing/summer_03_mc/.

Topics Schedule

Week 1 (Thursday, June 5, 2003): Introduction (Vision, definitions and Challenges) and Overview of Physical Layer

Overview of Topic

In this section, we take a look at the vision of mobile computing, understand key sub-areas of mobile, ubiquituous and pervasive computing. We also look at the wireless physical layer, the challenges which it presents.

Required Reading

• M. Satyanarayanan, "Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges." IEEE Personal Communications, volume 8, issue 4 , Aug. 2001. [ PDF file ] (Must be on campus to download)
• M. Weiser, "Some Computer Science Problems in Ubiquitous Computing," Communications of the ACM, July 1993. [ PDF file ] (Must be on campus to download)
• G. Forman and J. Zahorjan, "The Challenges of Mobile Computing," IEEE Computer, Vol. 27, No. 4, (April 1994), pp. 38-47. [ PDF file ] (Must be on campus to download)

Other Papers

• Mema Roussopoulos, Petros Maniatis, Edward Swierk, Kevin Lai, Guido Appenzeller, Mary Baker, "Person-Level Routing in the Mobile People Architecture." Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, October 1999
• M. Satyanarayanan, "Fundamental Challenges of Mobile Computing," ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1995. [ PDF file ]
• R. Katz, "Adaptation and Mobility in Wireless Information Systems," IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 1, No. 1, (Q1 1994), pp. 6-17.
• L. Kleinrock, "Nomadicity: Anytime, Anywhere In A Disconnected World," Mobile Networks and Applications, Vol. 1, No. 4, (January 1996), pp. 351-357.

Week 2 (Tuesday, June 10, 2003): Wireless Systems (Indoor and outdoor), MAC Protocols, and User Measurements

Overview of Topic

We will go over key indoor and outdoor wireless systems and MAC protocols. We will also go over the results of measurement studies which characterize how existing wireless networks are being used.

Required Reading

• Chandra A, Gummalla V and Limb J, Wireless Medium Access Control Protocols, IEEE Communications Surveys, 2000 [ PDF file ]
• D. Kotz and K. Essien, "Analysis of a Campus-Wide Wireless Network", Proceedings of the eighth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking 2002 , Atlanta, Georgia, USA [ PDF file ]

Other Papers

• B. Crow, I. Widjaja, J. Kim, P. Sakai, "IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks", IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume: 35 Issue: 9 , Sept. 1997. More material can be found at Breezecom Wireless Communications by P. Brenner, "A Technical Tutorial on the IEEE802.11 Protocol", A Technical Tutorial, and A Technical Overview
• Does the IEEE 802.11 MAC Protocol Work Well in Multihop Wireless Ad hoc Networks?, Xu and Saadawi, IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2001.
• Chapter 2-4 in Jochen Schiller, "Mobile Communications," Addison-Wesley, 2000
• L. Paulson, "Exploring the wireless LANscape," IEEE Computer, Vol. 33, No. 10, (Oct. 2000), pp. 12-16.
• R. LaMaire, A. Krishna, P. Bhagwat, J. Panian, "Wireless LANs and mobile networking: standards and future directions," IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 8, (Aug. 1996), pp. 86 -94.
• G. Patel and S. Dennett, "The 3GPP and 3GPP2 movements toward an all-IP mobile network," IEEE Personal Communications , Vol. 7, No. 4, (Aug. 2000), pp. 62-64
• M. Albrecht, M. Frank, P. Martini, M. Schetelig, A. Vilavaara, and A. Wenzel, "IP services over Bluetooth: leading the way to a new mobility," Proceedings of 24th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN'99), 1999, pp. 2-11.
• B. Sarikaya, "Packet mode in wireless networks: overview of transition to third generation," IEEE Communications Magazine , Vol. 38, No. 9 (Sep. 2000), pp. 164 -172
• Bluetooth: Technology for Short-Range Wireless Apps. Bhagwat, IEEE Internet Computing, May/June 2001.
• Bluetooth:Vision, Goals, and Architecture. Haartsen, Naghshineh, Inouye, Joeressen, and Allen, MCCR 1(2).
• Satellite-Based Internet - A Tutorial. Hu and Li, IEEE Communications, March 2001.
• D. Tang and M. Baker, "Analysis of a Metropolitan-Area Wireless Network", Wireless Networks 8, 2002, pp. 107-120
• M Balazinska and P Castro, "Characterizing Mobility and Network Usage in a Corporate Wireless Local-Area Network", Mobisys 2003
• A. Balachandran, G.M. Voelker, P. Bahl, and P.V. Rangan, Characterizing User Behavior and Network Performance in a Public Wireless LAN, SIGMETRICS 2002.

Week 3 (Thursday, June 19): Systems Issues: File Systems, Disconnected Operation, Power Savings, mobile agents, etc

Overview of Topic

Major computer science system issues in computer science shall investigated including the effects of disconnections on file systems and operating systems, power saving strategies, and mobile agents.

Required Reading

• J. Flinn and M Satyarayanan, "PowerScope: A Tool for Profiling the Energy Usage of Mobile Applications," Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications February, 1999, New Orleans, LA [ PDF file ]
• J. J. Kistler and M. Satyanarayanan, "Disconnected Operation in the Coda File System," ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 1992, pp. 3-25 [ PDF file ]

Other Papers

• B. Badrinath, A. Fox, L. Kleinrock, G. Popek, P. Reiher, and M. Satyanarayanan, "A conceptual framework for network and client adaptation," ACM MONET Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4, (Dec. 2000), pp. 221-231.
• J. Flinn and M. Satyanarayanan, Energy-Aware Adaptation for Mobile Applications, Proceedings of the 17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Kiawah Island Resort, SC, December 1999.
• David Goodman, Narayan Mandayam, "Power Control for Wireless Data", IEEE Personal Communications, April 2000
• Measuring and Reducing Energy Consumption of Network Interfaces in Hand-Held Devices. Stemm and Katz, IEICE Transactions on Communications, Aug. 1997.
• James J. Kistler and M. Satyanarayanan, "Disconnected operation in the coda file system." Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, October 13-16, 1991, Pacific Grove, California. Pages 213-225.
• L. B. Mummert, M. R. Ebling and M. Satyanarayanan, "Exploiting weak connectivity for mobile file access." Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, December 3-6, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado. Pages 143-155.
• Goldsmith A.J. and Wicker S.B., “Design challenges for energy-constrained ad hoc wireless networks,” IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 8-27, Aug. 2002.
• Ephremides A, “Energy concerns in wireless networks,” IEEE Wireless Communications, pp. 46-59, vol. 9, no. 4, Aug. 2002.
• F. Douglis, P. Krishnan and B. Bershad, "Adaptive disk spin-down policies for mobile computers." Computing systems, Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 1995
• C. Tait, Hui Lei, S. Acharya and Henry Chang, "Intelligent file hoarding for mobile computers," Proceedings of ACM MobiCom'95, pp. 119-125.
• B. Joy, "Shift from protocols to agents," IEEE Internet Computing , Vol. 4, No. 1, (Jan.-Feb. 2000), pp. 63-64.
• R. Gray, G. Cybenko, D. Kotz, and D. Rus, "Mobile agents: Motivations and State of the Art," In Jeffrey Bradshaw, editor, Handbook of Agent Technology, AAAI/MIT Press, 2001.
• T. Richardson, Q. Stafford-Fraser, K. Wood, and A. Hopper, "Virtual Network Computing," IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2, No. 1, Jan/Feb 1998, pp 33-38.
• V. A. Pham and A. Karmouch, "Mobile software agents: an overview," IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 36, No. 7, (July 1998), pp. 26-37.
• P. Morreale, "Agents on the move," IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 35, No. 4, (April 1998), pp. 34-41.

Week 4 (Thursday, June 26): Mobile/Ad Hoc Routing, Micromobility

Overview of Topic

Mobility is discussed including IP routing in ad hoc networks and micromobility approaches.

Required Reading

• E. Royer and C.-K. Toh, "A review of current routing protocols for ad hoc mobile wireless networks," IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 6, No. 2, (Apr. 1999), pp. 46-55. [ PDF file ]
• C. Perkins, "Mobile networking through Mobile IP." IEEE internet computing, January 1998. Pages 58-69 [ PDF file ]

Other Papers

• J. Broch, D. Maltz, D. Johnson, Y.-C. Hu, and J. Jetcheva, "A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols." In Proceedings of the fourth annual ACM/IEEE international conference on mobile computing and networking, October 1998, Dallas, Texas [ PDF file ]
• A. T. Campbell, Gomez, J., Kim, S., Turanyi, Z., Wan, C-Y. and A, Valko "Comparison of IP Micro-Mobility Protocols”, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 1, February 2002. [ PDF file ]
• C. Perkins. "Mobile IP", IEEE Comm., Vol. 35, No. 5, 1997, pp. 84­99.
• Charles E. Perkins and Elizabeth M. Royer. Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, New Orleans, LA, February 1999, pp. 90-100
• X. Zhao, C. Castelluccia and M. Baker, "Flexible network support for mobile hosts." To appear in MONET special issue on management of mobility in distributed systems, January 2001
• A. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan, "An End-to-End Approach to Host Mobility." Proceedings of MobiCom 2000, August 2000
• D. Johnson and C. Perkins, editors, "Mobility support in IPv6." Internet draft, Internet Engineering Task Force, Mobile IP Working Group, March 10, 2000
• . Bhagwat, C. Perkins, S. Tripathi, "Network layer mobility: an architecture and survey," IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 3, No. 3, (June 1996), pp. 54-64.
• Mark Stemm and Randy H. Katz "Vertical Handoffs in Wireless Overlay Networks," ACM Mobile Networking (MONET), Vol. 3, No. 4, (1998), pp. 335-350
• A. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan, "An End-to-End Approach to Host Mobility," Proceedings of ACM MobiCom 2000
• A. Stephane, A. Mihailovic, A. Aghvami, "Mechanisms and hierarchical topology for fast handover in wireless IP networks," IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 11, (Nov 2000), pp. 112-115
• Campbell and Gomez "IP Micro-Mobility Protocols“, ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computer and Communication Review (MC2R), Vol. 4, No. 4, pp 45-54, October 2001.
• R. Ramjee, T. La Porta, L. Salgarelli, S. Thuel, K. Varadhan, L. Li, "IP-based access network infrastructure for next-generation wireless data networks," IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 7, No. 4, (Aug 2000), pp. 34-41
• A. Campbell, J. Gomez, S. Kim, A. Valko, C. Wan, Z. Turanyi, "Design, implementation, and evaluation of cellular IP," IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 7, No. 4, (Aug 2000), pp. 42-49.
• C. Perkins (Editor), "Ad Hoc Networking," Addison Wesley, 2001.
• J. Solomon, "Mobile IP the Internet Unplugged," Prentice Hall, 1998.
• C. Perkins, "Mobile IP Design Principles and Practices," Addison-Wesley, 1998.

Week 5 (Thursday, July 3): Wireless Transport Protocols and TCP

Overview of Topic

The end to end effects and transport layer protocols are discussed.

Required Papers

• K. Pentikousis, TCP in Wired-Cum-Wireless Environments, IEEE Communications Surveys, Fourth Quarter 2000, Vol. 3, No.1 6, pp. 2-14 [ PDF file ]
• N. Vaidya, TCP for Wireless and Mobile Hosts, tutorial talk presented at 1999 MobiCom (Seattle) [ ppt slides ] [ References PDF file ]

Other Papers

• H. Elaarag, Improving TCP performance over mobile networks, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.34 n.3, p.357-374, September 2002 [ PDF file ]
• George Xylomenos and George C. Polyzos, "TCP and UDP Performance over a Wireless LAN", Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 99 Conference, pp.439-446
• H. Balakrishnan, S. Seshan, R. H. Katz, "Improving Reliable Transport and Handoff Performance in Cellular Wireless Networks", ACM Wireless Networks, V 1, N 4, December, 1995.
• Christina Parsa, J.J Garcia-Luna-Aceves, "Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Networks at the Link Layer", Mobile Networks and Applications, 1999.
• H. Balakrishnan, V. Padmanabhan, S. Seshan and R. Katz, "A comparison of mechanisms for improving TCP performance over wireless links." IEEE/ACM transactions on networking, December 1997.
• A. Bakre and B. Badrinath, "Implementation and performance evaluation of Indirect TCP," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 46, No. 3, (Mar 1997), pp. 260-278
• R. Caceres and L. Iftode, "Improving the performance of reliable transport protocols in mobile computing environments," IEEE JSAC, Vol. 13, No. 5, (Jun 1995), pp. 850-857.
• H. Balakrishnan, V. Padmanabhan and R. Katz, "The effects of asymmetry on TCP performance." ACM mobile networks and applications (MONET), 1999.

Week 6 (Week of ???): Applications (Application-Aware and Context-Aware Adaptation, Multimedia)

Overview of Topic

Application-aware and context-aware applications are discussed.

Required Reading

• B. Noble and M Satyanarayanan, "Experience with Adaptive Mobile Applications in Odyssey", Mobile Networks and Applications 4 (1999) pp. 245-254 [ PDF file ]
• B. Noble, "System Support for Mobile, Adaptive Applications," IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 7, No. 1, (Feb. 2000). [ PDF file ]

Other Papers

• Robin Kravets and P. Krishnan, "Application-Driven Power Management for Mobile Communication", ACM/URSI/Baltzer Wireless Networks (WINET) special issue of Best Papers from MobiCom'98.
• J. Flinn and M. Satyanarayanan, "Energy-aware adaptation for mobile applications." Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on operating systems principles, December 12-15, 1999, Kiawah Island Resort, South Carolina
• B. Noble, M. Satyanarayanan, D. Narayanan, J. Tilton, J. Flinn and K. Walker, "Agile application-aware adaptation for mobility." Proceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on operating system principles, October 1997, St. Malo, France
• A. Harter, A. Hopper, P. Steggles, A. Ward, and P. Webster, "The Anatomy of a Context-Aware Application," Proceedings of ACM MobiCOM'99.

Week 7 (Week of ???): Data Access over Wireless

Overview of Topic

Data management and database issues in mobile environments are discussed. Issues include data dissemination in the face of assymetry and intermittent connections, consistency models, and location-dependent data distribution.

Papers

• D. Barbara, "Mobile Computing and Databases - A Survey," IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 11, No. 1, (Jan/Feb 1999), pp. 108-117.
• S. Acharya, R. Alonso, M. Franklin, and S. Zdonik, "Broadcast Disks: Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments," Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD'1995.
• T. Imielinski, S. Viswanathan, and B. Badrinath, "Data on Air: Organization and Access," IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 9, No. 3, (May/Jun 1997), pp. 353-372.
• S. Acharya, "“Broadcast Disks”: Dissemination-based Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments," Ph.D. Thesis, Brown University, 1997.
• D. B. Terry, A. J. Demers, K. Petersen, M. J. Spreitzer, M. M. Theimer and B. B. Welch. "Session guarantees for weakly consistent replicated data." Proceedings of the international conference on parallel and distributed information systems (PDIS), September 1994, Austin, Texas. Pages 140-149.
• Karin Petersen, Mike J. Spreitzer, Douglas B. Terry, Marvin M. Theimer and Alan J. Demers, "Flexible update propagation for weakly consistent replication." Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, October 5-8, 1997, Saint-Malo, France. Pages 288-301
• E. Pitoura and B. Bhargava, "Data Consistency in Intermittently Connected Distributed Systems," IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 11, No. 6, (Nov/Dec 1999), pp. 896-915.
• M. Dunham and V. Kumar, "Location dependent data and its management in mobile databases," Proceedings of 9th Int'l Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 1998, pp. 414-419

Week 8 (Week of ???): Location Sensing and Wireless Sensor Networks

Overview of Topic

We look at location sensing wireless networks, mobility management and user location and tracking.

Papers

• Jeffrey Hightower, Gaetano Borriello. "Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing.", IEEE Computer, August 2001, pp. 57-66
• Hiroaki Koshima, Joseph Hoshen. "Personal Locator Services Emerge.", IEEE Spectrum, February 2000
• Potte G.J. and Kaiser W.J.,"Wireless Integrated Network Sensors", Communications of the ACM, May 2000/Vol 43, No. 5
• Weatherall J. and Jones A., “Ubiquitous networks and their applications,” IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 18-29, Feb. 2002.
• I. Akyildiz, J. McNair, J. Ho, H. Uzunalioglu, and W. Wang, "Mobility management in next-generation wireless systems," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 87, No. 8, (Aug 1999), pp. 1347-1384.
• Pararnvir Bahl, Venkata N. Padmanabhan. "User Location and Tracking in an In-building Radio Network." Describes the early implementation of RADAR, which uses 802.11 networks
• Scott Klemmer, Sarah Waterson, Kamin Whitehouse. "Towards a Location-based Context-aware Sensor Infrastructure." Describes early work in localization algorithms within the SensorWebs framework, which is a completely ad-hoc sensor network
• Nissanka B Priyantha, Anit Chakraborty, Hari Balakrishnan. "The Cricket Location-support System."
• Nigel Davies, Keith Cheverest, et al. "Caches in the Air: Disseminating Tourist Information in the Guide System." Describes a system similar to RADAR which uses 802.11, but is implemented outdoors.
• D. Estrin, R. Govindan, J. Heidemann and S. Kumar, " Next Century Challenges: Scalable Coordination in Sensor Networks," In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networks (MobiCOM '99), August 1999, Seattle, Washington.

Week 9 (Week of ???): Wireless Security and Intrusion Detection

Overview of Topic

We look at security and intrusion detection in wireless networks.

Papers

• L D Paulson, "Vendors Push Wireless LAN Security", IEEE Computer, January 2003, pp. 28-30
• Y Zhang and W Lee, "Intrusion Detection in Wirless Ad-Hoc Networks.", ACM Mobicom 2000
• A D Wood and J A Stankovic, "Denial of Service in Sensor Networks", IEEE Computer, October 2002, pp. 48-56
• J-P Hubaux, L Buttyan and S Capkun, "The Quest for Security in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks", ACM Symposium on Mobile and Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHOC) 2001
• L Zhou and Z J Haas, "Securing Ad Hoc Networks", IEEE Network, November/December 1999
• J Kong et al, "Providing Robust and Ubiquitous Security Support for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks", in Proc. 9th Int'l Conf. Network Protocols, 2001, pp. 251-260
• A Pfitzmann, B Pfitzmann and M Waidner, "Trusting Mobile User Devices and Security Modules", IEEE Computer, February 1997

Discussion

All participants will be expected to have read assigned papers and contribute to discussions. I will come with insights and in shall lead the discussions.

Software Resources

Web Sites of Interest

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