The Importance of Scalability in Networking Research

Advances in low-power operations, energy harvesting, battery density, and reduced size/weight manufacturing allow computers to perform useful work in 'extreme' environments away from dedicated power supplies and reliable data communications. Examples of such deployed 'nodes' include computers carried by people, cars, drones, submersibles, or spacecraft. The advent of significantly mobile computing devices creates novel new networking architectures that require novel new protocols and algorithms to make them work; the research that enables the 'Internet of Moving Things' must overcome significant obstacles relating to signal propagation delays, link disruptions, heterogeneous networking stacks, and differing administrative domains. Since these obstacles change in non-linear ways, algorithms must be demonstrated in the context of a framework that can scale the diameter, density, and link state associated with these environments. This talk discusses novel networking research in the field of mobile, wireless, challenged networking in the context of intelligent highway initiatives, underwater surveillance, national border patrol, and solar-system networking. Further, this talk addresses the importance of heuristic modeling and simulation for characterizing network performance and how these experiments are usefully enabled by the goals of the GENI project.

Bio: Mr. Ed Birrane is a member of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Principal Professional Staff and is a supervisor for the Ground Applications Group in their Space Exploration Sector. He has a background in real-time and embedded systems programming, including flight software for the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto and the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University, and will receive his Ph.D. in December from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he is an affiliate researcher within their Networks and Systems Security Laboratory and Cyber-Defense Laboratory. Through his current work with NASA in constructing Challenged Sensor Internetworks, he is authoring standards for securing and managing Delay-Tolerant networks.