Networks and Mobile Systems

overview	-	Elevator pitch
projects	-	NMS Projects
people	-	Who are we?
publications	-	NMS Papers
software	-	Public-domain software and hardware designs from the NMS group
support	-	Who sponsors NMS?
fun stuff	-	Random, miscellaneous stuff and some group parties

Overview

The NMS group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory conducts research in many areas of networking and mobile computing, with an emphasis on designing, implementing, and evaluating network systems, protocols, and applications. Our mission is to prepare the next generation of researchers and developers in these areas by investigating challenging, high-impact research projects and building production-quality systems. Our projects span a large spectrum: wireless and sensor networks, robust and resilient networking using overlays and peer-to-peer (P2P) techniques, and Internet protocols and performance.

Projects

Wireless & sensor networks

The Mist page lists a few sensor networking projects, including:
- The CarTel project is developing a mobile sensor network; applications include sensors on cars. The CarTel software handles the acquisition, processing, delivery, and analysis/visualization of mobile sensor data.
- WaveScope, a sensor computing system for high data-rate applications.
- Mistlab, an indoor sensornet testbed.
SLAM: Scalable Location-Aware Monitoring is a scalable network architecture integrating millions of real-world sensors with actuators and distributed software applications:
- Cricket is an indoor location system for applications running on handhelds and networked sensors to discover their location. In July 2004, we released the Cricket v2 software and user manual. You can purchase Cricket units from Crossbow Technologies.
- Medusa is a federated large-scale distributed stream processing system.
  - Medusa uses NMSTL, a Networking, Messaging, Servers, and Threading Library for C++, which is a general-purpose toolkit for implementing high-performance servers quickly.
The Patient-Centric Network project is developing a networking and systems infrastructure for future medical environments.
The Divert project is developing a multi-radio, fine-grained path selection system for reducing frame losses and improving capacity in wireless LANs.
The APware project is developing a system to improve performance and robustness for multi-rate wireless LANs

Resilient and secure networking

Project IRIS is a multi-institution collaboration on designing the network and system infrastructure for resilient Internet services using distributed hash tables like Chord as overlay networks. Two example IRIS services:
- SFR, Semantic-Free Referencing is a reference resolution service for linked systems that is location independent, human unreadable, and flexible. We believe that SFR would provide more robust and less contentious referencing for the Web than DNS-based URLs currently do.
- DOA, Delegation-Oriented Architecture is an extension to the Internet architecture in which senders and receivers direct traffic through intermediaries with a delegation primitive. The goal is to accommodate middleboxes in an architecturally coherent way.
Correct Internet routing: including the rcc tool and various experimental analyses of Internet routing and failures.
MONET, an overlay network of multi-homed Web proxies for improving Web availability.
XCP: Congestion control for high bandwidth-delay product networks, traffic engineering.
Real-Time Anomaly Detection
Securing SSH from address harvesting attacks.
Infranet is a system to circumvent Web censorship.

Some completed projects

Horde is networking middleware that allows an application to stripe data from multiple streams across a set of dissimilar wireless network channels.
RON (Resilient Overlay Networks), an application-controlled robust routing architecture for improving the reliability and resilience of packet routing in the wide-area Internet.
CM (Congestion Manager), an integrated end-to-end congestion management architecture for the future Internet. This includes several new adaptive applications, including OxygenTV for Internet MPEG-4 delivery.
DNS analysis: trace-based analysis of DNS performance and caching.
Span, an energy-efficient topology formation protocol for wireless ad hoc networks.
Sensor networking protocols including LEACH and Spin.
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.
Several of our projects contributed to Project Oxygen.
The MECN project is developing a General Multiplexed ECN Channel
Blueware, protocols for internetworking with Bluetooth.
Spectrumware, which explores new algorithms for radio and wireless physical layers for implementation on a flexible software platform.
TESLA is a toolkit for building transparent session-layer services.

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M. I. T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · 32 Vassar Street · Cambridge, MA 02139 · USA