Rice Networks Group Research Projects
Technology for All Wireless
We have architected and deployed a multi-hop multi-tier wireless network in one of Houston's most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The societal objective of this network is to empower under-resourced communities with access to technology and educational and work-at-home tools. Our network design objectives encompass both performance objectives (pervasive Internet access at Megabits per second) and economic objectives (sustainable deployment and operating costs for low-income demographics). Finally, we address research challenges including measurement, performance analysis, and protocol design.
TAPs and WARP
We have designed and implemented a FPGA-based hardware platform for clean-slate design of wireless network protocols. The platform is fully programmable at all layers from the physical layer on up. The platform supports cross-layer protocol implementation and has a high-performance physical layer for "at scale" experiments.
100x100
This project is driven by the vision of providing 100 Mb/sec to 100 Million households and small businesses. By providing a greater than two order of magnitude increase in end-to-end interconnection speed, such an infrastructure will provide a platform that enables radically new content, applications, and services to emerge over the next decades. We are devising a new architecture and protocols that jointly provide (1) cost-effective and resilient access networks that utilize both fiber-to-the-home and wireless last-hop access, (2) a scalable, fault-tolerant backbone network having simple logical structure and predictable performance, (3) economic efficiency that ensures sustained competition, and (4) security that strikes a balance between accountability vs. anonymity, as well as connectivity vs. isolation.
Resilience to Denial of Service Attack
We are studying DoS resilience in transport protocols, multi-hop wireless networks, peer-to-peer networks, and Internet Data Centers. In each case, we analyze protocol and system vulnerabilities to develop an understanding of the extent to which attackers can disrupt a system. Such studies include analysis of "attack scalability" which characterizes the relationship between the number of attackers and their performance impact on the victims. We study and develop families of counter-DDoS mechanisms. For example, for application layer attacks, we showed that an effective strategy is request scheduling (determination of when and if to service a request) driven by suspicion measures that characterize deviation from a normal workload. In peer-to-peer networks, we showed that reputation systems are unfortunately ineffective, unless they operate with near perfection.
