[talks] Robert Kiefer will present his Pre-FPO on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 10am in Room 401.

Nicki Gotsis ngotsis at CS.Princeton.EDU
Thu Feb 19 11:33:27 EST 2015


Robert Kiefer will present his Pre-FPO on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 10am in Room 401.

The members of his committee are:   
Mike Freedman (advisor)
Jennifer Rexford (reader)
Nick Feamster (reader)
Margaret Martonosi (non-reader)
Kai Li (non-reader)

Everyone is invited to attend his talk.  The talk title and abstract follow below:

"New Abstractions for Mobile Connectivity and Resource Management"

Abstract: Over the past decade, consumer computing has gone mobile: smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other mobile devices are now commonplace.  While the mobility offered by these devices provide great flexibility, they introduce new limitations in terms of data caps and battery life. Further, as these devices have quickly evolved, they have yet to expose clean abstractions for managing their network resources, and the network similarly lacks support for mobility as a first-class property.

This thesis addresses these two limitations.  First, we present work designed to improve mobile device connectivity in the network, e.g., to better support connection migration between networks such as WiFi and LTE.  In particular, we present Serval, a new network stack that addresses the overloading of IP+port in the TCP/IP network stack while also cleanly separating connection management from data delivery by adding a Service Access Layer. By using an opaque identifier called a "service ID" for naming network services, Serval decouples the service being offered from its physical location (IP). Another opaque identifier, the "flow ID", is used to identify individual data flows, removing the need to use IP/port when demuxing flows. This frees hosts running Serval to change location (IP) while still maintaining connectivity, a major benefit for mobile hosts who may find themselves transitioning between different networks (LTE, 3G, WiFi) frequently.  Our migration protocol, ECCP, has been formally verified.

Second, we introduce new methods for managing device resources such as data consumption, battery life, etc.  In particular, we introduce Tango, a platform that allows users to specify network resource management preferences via policy. Policy in Tango are encoded as free-form programs that continuously compute on device and environment state to take actions to manage resource usage. These actions include limiting flows to certain rates or priorities, moving flows to a different network, and managing to which networks a device is connected. Additionally, Tango enables applications to hook into the platform with their own policies, using app-local information (buffers, queues) to further tune network usage.


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