Networking, Distributed Systems, and Security

(Micah Adler, Mark Corner, Kevin Fu, Deepak Ganesan, Jim Kurose, Brian Levine, Gerome Miklau, Eliot Moss, Arnold Rosenberg, Prashant Shenoy, Ramesh Sitaraman, Don Towsley, Arun Venkataramani)

Networking and distributed systems provide the infrastructure for computation, communication and storage involving a heterogeneous and potentially large number of people, hardware devices, and software processes. Issues of concern include performance, security, scalability, functionality, and manageability. Our research aims at developing the protocols, system architecture, and underlying principles for these systems. Our approaches range from highly experimental systems research, to modeling and measurement, to theory. Our research areas include protocol design, network security and privacy, RFID security, wireless and mobile networks, disruption tolerant networks, sensor networks, WWW protocols and content distribution networks, embedded systems, real-time and multimedia systems, network algorithmics, performance modeling and analysis, network measurement, virtualization, storage and file systems, and autonomic computing.

Advanced Computer Networking Research Group
Research in the Computer Networking Research Group focuses on communication protocols (particularly for multimedia servers, live multimedia, and multicast), quality of service issues including call admission, and performance modeling.

Architecture and Language Implementation
The Architecture and Language Implementation group has the goal of improving the performance of computer systems through the synergistic enhancement of the compiler, run-time environment, and architecture. Efforts include the Scale compiler and a wide range of optimizations for improving memory subsystem performance, Java virtual machines, garbage collection algorithms, microarchitectural support for advanced compiler and run-time optimizations, and parallel architectures.

Database and Information Management Laboratory
The Database and Information Management Laboratory (DBLab) focuses on the development of information infrastructures and data management systems for efficiently and securely managing large volumes of data. The research group is particularly interested in the challenges posed by emerging data types like XML and streaming data, and issues that arise in non-traditional architectures like embedded systems.

Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere
The NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) seeks to revolutionize the way we observe, detect, and predict atmospheric phenomena by creating distributed collaborative adaptive sensor networks that sample the atmosphere where and when end-users needs are greatest.

Laboratory for Advanced System Software
The Laboratory for Advanced System Software (LASS) conducts research in the areas of file systems, operating systems, computer networks, and large-scale distributed systems, all with an emphasis on multimedia.

PRivacy, Internetworking, Security, and Mobile Systems Laboratory
The PRivacy, Internetworking, Security, and Mobile Systems Laboratory (PRISMS) is concerned with the challenges of supporting enormous numbers of peers or devices, the unique opportunities of mobile and ubiquitous computing, and providing security and privacy in the presence of continued network and Internet threats.

Theoretical Aspects of Parallel and Distributed Systems
Research in the TAPADS group focuses on theoretical aspects of the design and effective use of parallel and distributed computing systems and of communication networks. Issues currently being studied include load-balancing and scheduling of parallel computations, enhancing the computational power of parallel architectures using network emulations, emulating fault-free networks on possibly fault-laden ones, and efficient communication in interconnection networks and communication networks.

Theoretical Computer Science Group
Theoretical Computer Science is the quantitative and formal study of computing: which problems can be solved? what resources (for example, time or memory space) are required to solve them? Our faculty specializing in a variety of areas, including the complexity of algebraic computations, the complexity of parallel computation, the descriptive complexity of computation, and the theory of parallel and distributed processing.

Wireless Sensor Networks Group
The wireless senor networks research group conducts research on a variety of systems, networking and data managment issues in data-centric sensor networks. The group's focus is on building scalable energy-efficient sensor networks through the use of heterogeneous sensor modalities, sensor platforms and processors.