CS&E Colloquium: Towards Robust, High-Throughput Next Generation Wireless Networks: Protocol Design and Performance Evaluation in the Wild

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas (Northeastern University), will be giving a talk titled "Towards Robust, High-Throughput Next Generation Wireless Networks: Protocol Design and Performance Evaluation in the Wild."

Abstract

IEEE 802.11ad, operating in the millimeter wave (mmWave) 60 GHz band, and 5G (which also includes mmWave among its operating frequency bands) are the two primary technologies for enabling multi-Gbps data rates in WiFi and cellular networks, holding the promise to finally support the next-generation of bandwidth-intensive applications such as augmented and virtual reality, panoramic video streaming, and connected autonomous vehicles. However, 10 and 5 years after their initial rollouts, none of the two technologies has yet unleashed their full potential. The high propagation loss in the mmWave frequency bands necessitates the use of directional antennas, which make links susceptible to disruption by human blockage and client mobility. Hence, a key challenge in mmWave networks is that end nodes need to continually align their beams to establish and maintain directional links, which incurs significant overhead. On the other hand, the high complexity of the 5G ecosystem, the diversity of radio technologies and deployment modes, and the geographically diverse policies employed by cellular operators call for extensive large-scale measurement studies to help the research community, operators, vendors, and app developers understand the potential and limitations of today’s 5G deployments and improve future deployments. In this talk, I will present our research efforts over the past 8 years to address these challenges. The first part of the talk will present our work towards low overhead, robust communication in mmWave WLANs, based on the core idea of leveraging multiple frequency bands to augment the mmWave control and data planes. The second part of the talk will present our recent efforts towards a detailed understanding of the performance of today’s 5G networks, their policy-based configurations, and their potential to support 5G “killer apps”, through a series of large-scale measurement campaigns, including multiple cross-country driving trips (15,000+ km) and measurements in several major US cities. I will finish by describing our ongoing work to deploy an open, programmable, multi-vendor 5G O-RAN testbed at Northeastern University and briefly discussing other ongoing and future work towards building the next generation of wireless networks and enabling the next generation of mobile apps over such networks.

Biography

Dimitrios Koutsonikolas received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in August 2010 and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the same department from September to December 2010. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University and a member of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things. Previously, he was in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University at Buffalo (UB), The State University of New York, first as an assistant professor (2011-2016) and then as an associate professor (2017-2020) and Director of Graduate Studies (2018-2020). Dimitrios’ research interests are broadly in experimental wireless networking and mobile computing, with a current focus on 5G and Beyond 5G networks and applications. He received an IEEE Region 1 Technological Innovation (Academic) Award in 2019, the UB Teaching Innovation Award in 2018, the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Senior Teacher of the Year Award in 2017 and the Early Career Researcher of the Year Award in 2015, the NSF CAREER Award in 2016, Best Paper Awards in IEEE GLOBECOM 2023, ACM WiNTECH 2022, ACM mmNets 2019, IEEE WCNC 2017, and SENSORCOMM 2007, and a Best Dataset Award in PAM 2021. He served as general chair for IEEE LANMAN 2024, IEEE WoWMoM 2023, and ACM EWSN 2018, as TPC chair for IEEE LANMAN 2023, IEEE HPSR 2023, IEEE DCOSS 2022, IEEE WoWMoM 2021, and IFIP Networking 2021, and as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing from 2017 to 2024. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM and a member of USENIX.