Events Calendar

CS Colloquium

Speaker: Dr. Romit Roy Choudhury, Duke University

Talk Title: Back to the Drawing Board: Rethinking Wireless Networks with Software Radios

Abstract: Wireless networks are mostly architected on the principles of modularity and layering. Emerging software radio platforms are beginning to blur the layer-boundaries, exporting PHY layer information to the MAC. The access to such information is proving to be invaluable, empowering researchers to question long-standing assumptions, conceive disruptive ideas, and test their feasibility on actual systems.

We have been performing such exercises at Duke and the results have been promising. For instance, while traditional MAC protocols perform contention resolution in the time domain (also called backoff), we find that OFDM based systems can migrate this process into the frequency domain, thereby eliminating a long-standing source of inefficiency. In another example, we show that collision detection (implmented in wired Ethernets) may be feasible even in wireless networks, through well-understood ideas in interference cancellation. This talk will elaborate on a number of such ongoing projects in our lab, with an emphasis on the bold and disruptive nature in these approaches. We will close not only with challenges we are struggling with, but will also look into what may lie ahead under the broader umbrella of PHY layer enabled systems.

Biography: Romit Roy Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of ECE and CS at Duke University (he recently spent the summer of 2010 as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond). He joined Duke in Fall 2006, after completing his PhD from UIUC. His research interests are in wireless networking mainly at the MAC/PHY layer, and in mobile computing at the application layer. He received the NSF CAREER Award in January 2008, and was appointed the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor in 2009. Visit Romit's Systems Networking Research Group (SyNRG), at http://synrg.ee.duke.edu


Host: Prof. Ramesh Govindan

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal