End-System Coordination for Collaborative and Cognitive Networking in a Multi-Radio Environment

Speaker:	Dr. Qian Zhang
		Microsoft Research Asia

Topic:		"End-System Coordination for Collaborative and
		 Cognitive Networking in a Multi-Radio Environment"

Date:		Wednesday, 4 May 2005

Time:		3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Venue:		Room 3464 (Conference Room, via lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

ABSTRACT:

The last decade has witnessed an explosion in wireless technologies,
including WiFi, WiMax, UWB, 3G, Bluetooth, etc. These technologies will
co-exist in the future to form a multi-radio wireless system providing
different service abilities to the user applications. With the
proliferation of wireless enabled devices, and especially multi-radio/
multi-band enabled devices, much attention has been paid to the desire to
ensure "always best connected" system. Collaborative and cognitive
networking (CCN) is proposed to make the devices cognitive to the
environment and adapt to the best performance by end-system collaboration.

After introducing the scope of CCN, I will present two concrete
technologes, i.e., ProFITS and SoftMAC. ProFITS targets at seamless
roaming across heterogeneous wireless networks such as wireless wide area
network (WWAN) and wireless local area network (WLAN). A novel seamless
and proactive end-to-end mobility management system is presented, which
can maintain the connections based on the end-to-end principle by
incorporating an intelligent network status detection mechanism. Two core
components of this system, i.e., connection manager (CM) and virtual
connectivity (VC), are introduced in detail. A prototype system is built
to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

To address the VoIP delivery over multi-hop networks, Layer 2.5 SoftMAC
that resides between the 802.11 MAC layer and IP layer is proposed to
coordinate the real-time and best-effort packet transmission among
neighboring nodes in a multi-hop wireless network. Distributed admission
control, rate control, and non-preemptive priority queueing is introduced
to regulate the contention in the multi-hop system. We implement our
proposed SoftMAC as a Windows Network Driver Interface Specification
(NDIS) driver over Network Interface Card (NIC) driver, and build a
multi-hop wireless network testbed with 32 wireless nodes equipped with
802.11 a/b/g combo cards. Our evaluation and testing results demonstrate
the effectiveness of our proposed software solution.




*************************
Biography:

Qian Zhang received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Wuhan
University, China, in 1994, 1996, and 1999, respectively, all in computer
science. She started her career with Microsoft Research Asia (by then
Microsoft Research China), Beijing, China, in July 1999 firstly as an
associated researcher, promoted to researcher in 2001, and became the
research manager of the Wireless and Networking Group at the end of 2004.

Dr. Zhang has published about 90 refereed papers in international leading
journals and key conferences in the areas of wireless/Internet multimedia
system, wireless communications and networking, and overlay system. She is
the inventor of about 30 pending patents; in particular she made key
contributions in technology devolvement in multimedia delivery over
wireless and Internet, peer-to-peer multimedia distribution, seamless
roaming across heterogeneous wireless networks, and multi-hop wireless
system. Her current research interest includes seamless roaming across
different wireless networks, multimedia delivery over wireless, Internet,
next-generation wireless system, P2P system and multi-hop wireless
networks. She also participated many activities in the IETF ROHC (Robust
Header Compression) WG group for TCP/IP header compression.

Dr. Zhang is a member of the Visual Signal Processing and Communication
Technical Committee and the Multimedia System and Application Technical
Committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. She is also a member
and chair of QoSIG of the Multimedia Communication Technical Committee of
the IEEE Communications Society. Dr. Zhang is the Associate Editor for
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technologies. She is now also serving as
Guest Editor for special issue on wireless video in IEEE wireless
Communication Magazine. Dr. Zhang has received TR 100 (MIT Technology
Review) world's top young innovator award for her contribution in
improved roaming between cellular networks and created better
compression and delivery technologies for wireless multimedia. She also
received the Best Asia Pacific (AP) Young Researcher Award elected by IEEE
Communication Society in year 2004.