Projects
Graduate students or undergraduates, please see information on the main page as well as a few notes below. You can also check out our public software artifacts via the
Software page.
On-Going Projects
Our primary on-going projects for the
NetScale laboratory both supported and unsupported.
| Project Name |
Status |
Description |
| GEMS |
On-going |
Scientific applications often demand more intermediate storage space than is available on small servers. In a typical University or business network, a great deal of storage space is available for harvesting, because modern workstations ship with much more space than is usually immediately consumed. How can users safely and easily cooperate to use this space, with security, high fault-tolerance, and disk management? |
| Grab GEMS via SourceForge |
| Visit our local GEMS information page to download or view the status of GEMS |
| Support: NSF DBI |
| Lockdown |
On-going |
Security policy is a multi-faceted problem that needs to be enforced at different levels of a system. Attempts to resolve the problem of how to enhance network connectivity with information for better security based decision making while keeping an emphasis on simple deployment and management have been insufficient. Existing solutions take the approach of hammering network-centric mechanisms towards the policy. These solutions are not simple to deploy or manage, sometimes requiring reconfiguration of the network resources or a completely new structure. Some of the solutions in the form of intrusion detection systems are passive, only notifying of an intrusion after the fact. Our project, Lockdown, looks to simplify the deployment and management issues of enhancing network connectivity information while improving upon intrusion detection by providing an active intrusion prevention system. |
| Scaling Quality of Service |
On-going |
The emergence of real-time sensor rich and distributed command/control environments has placed an exclamation point on the distinct lack of practical end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS). The de facto compromise of overprovisioning is becoming increasingly untenable as new data sources and applications continually erode network capacity. Although significant research has been conducted on QoS, the notion of dominant approach to end-to-end (E2E) QoS remains elusive. Beyond deployment obstacles, a significant portion of issues with QoS can be directly traced to the complex and often slow per-hop or per-domain resource negotitation procedures, often justified through amortization over the cost of long-term bulk data flows (ex. FTP). The goal of this research is to make significant strides in practical end-to-end QoS with special consideration for the highly variable and mobile nature of the tactical network. The research leverages the group's recent work on Edge-centric Resource Management (ERM) and the group's work on the on-going DARPA TCP/IP Control Plane efforts to deliver expedited and effective mechanisms that dramatically simplify and streamline end-to-end QoS. The end result of the research will be a much more robust and flexible network, practically achievable without a clean slate design. |
| Transparent Bandwidth Conservation |
On-going |
In this project, we are developing a suite of new techniques for bandwidth conservation that provide the simplicity for deployment of caching while possessing the ability to handle data with close temporal proximity. The initial core of the work, stealth multicast, offers an externally transparent bandwidth conservation technique that dynamically converts redundant traffic to and from virtual multicast groups in a single domain. In addition, we are developing inter-domain peering protocols for both stealth multicast and existing packet caching approaches. The research areas are being further augmented by the development of an improved network stack that exploits the presence of bandwidth conservation by increasing redundancy for a net system improvement. |
| Stealth Multicast |
| Passive Application Layer Multicast (PALM) |
| Explicit End of Data (EEOD) |
| Tail-Synchronized Playback |
Projects in the Initial Stages
| Project Name |
Status |
Description |
| Flash power assessment |
Initial stages |
The rapid growth of storage capabilities of USB flash drives presents interesting opportunities with regards to delay tolerant networking. The focus of this research is compare a vast suite of current flash drive offerings with regards to read/write performance and power consumption with respect to the mobile environment. The work is current being conducted as part of a REU project by Kyle O'Brien. The work is also supporting a pending DARPA proposal. |
| Parallelizing similarity extraction |
Initial stages |
One of the key obstacles faced by our work in bandwidth conservation is the ability to analyze vast quantities of data for similarity. Currently, we are faced with either doing a fast but limited whole payload comparison such as an MD5 hash or applying a more flexible but significantly slower algorithm such as Rabin fingerprinting. We are examining largely parallel systems such as the nVidia GeForce? 8800 GPU and the PlayStation? 3. The work is currently being conducted as part of a REU project by Nathan Kohlmeier. |
| Data visualization |
Initial stages |
With the torrent of data that we produce from transparent bandwidth conservation, GEMS, and LockDown, the ability to visualize the data is critical to our results. We are adapted SoNIA together with Java-based controls to help visualize the data produced by our systems for both directing research and system management. |
| Wireless reliability |
Initial stages |
One of the commonly perceived causes for wireless loss is noise in the underlying channel itself. In contrast, our preliminary work has found that losses are often due as much to the device itself as much as the channel. We have conducted several experiments demonstrating that losses between closely located nodes in high SNR areas are poorly correlated, i.e. the losses are not consistent across the respective receivers. |
Past Projects / Projects In Limbo
| Project Name |
Status |
Description |
| GenMCast |
Maintenance only |
GenMCast is an extension to the ns-2 simulator that replaces the internal multicast core to allow for multi-protocol development without having to work with the underlying tcl internals of ns-2. GenMCast allows a developer to work entirely in C++ with built-in mechanisms for garbage control, statistic monitoring, and dynamic header information. GenMCast is a work in progress and was originally developed while Dr. Striegel was a graduate student at Iowa State University. Periodic maintenance is performed as necessary for projects utilizing the GenMCast platform. |
| GIPSE |
Limbo |
To be added - Website |
| Rogue Wireless Access Point Detection |
On-going |
Wireless network access has become an integral part of computing both at home and at the workplace. The convenience of wireless network access at work may be extremely beneficial to employees, but can be a burden to network security personnel. This burden is magnified by the threat of inexpensive wireless access points being installed in a network without the knowledge of network administrators. These devices, termed Rogue Wireless Access Points, may allow a malicious outsider to access valuable network resources, including confidential communications and other stored data. For this reason, wireless connectivity detection is an essential capability, but remains a difficult problem. We present a method of detecting wireless hosts using a local RTT metric and a novel packet payload slicing technique. The local RTT metric provides the means to identify physical transmission media while packet payload slicing conditions network traffic to enhance the accuracy of the detection. Most importantly, the packet payload slicing method is transparent to both clients and servers and does not require direct communication between the monitoring system and monitored hosts. |
| Grab the RIPPS (Rogue Identifying Packet Payload Slicer) software |
| Grab the pre-final version of our ACM TISSEC publication on RIPPS |
| SESRAA |
Limbo |
An interesting challenge facing service providers is the resource exhaustion attack brought on by botnet hosts whereby the botnet hosts appear to be legitimate by virtue of their sheer magnitude. Our work examines how data mining and randomization can be brought to bear to act similar to a surgeon's triage, preserving those with the highest likelihood of goodness to allow for some service until other mitigation mechanisms can be brought to bear. |
Notes for Grads/Undergrads
To be added
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