Toronto Networking Seminar



Message Ferrying and Other Short Stories: Mobility-Assisted Data Delivery in Wireless Networks

Mostafa H. Ammar
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date:  Thursday, October 5,  2pm
Location: SFB 1105 (Sand Center)


*This seminar is  part of the ECTI Distinguished Seminar Series

Abstract:

Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are a class of emerging mobile and wireless networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions. These networks have a variety of applications in situations that include communication in natural disaster or other hostile environments deep-space communication, vehicular communication, and non-interactive Internet access in remote areas. In this talk, I will first overview the basic motivation and survey some initial work in this emerging area. I will then provide an overview of our work which is concerned with the development of a "Message Ferrying" (MF) scheme, inspired by its real life analog, that implements a non-traditional "store, carry and forward" routing paradigm using node mobility to overcome network partitioning. In the MF scheme, a set of mobile nodes called message ferries takes responsibility for carrying messages between disconnected nodes. I will then place our message ferrying work in the larger context by describing a novel taxonomy for mobile wireless networks, which admits various ranges of disconnection and mobility.

Bio:

Mostafa Ammar is a Regents' Professor with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He has been with Georgia Tech since 1985. He received the S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1985. Dr. Ammar's research interests are in network architectures, protocols and services. He has contributions in the areas of multicast communication and services, multimedia streaming, content distribution networks, network simulation and most recently in disruption-tolerant networks and overlay network design. He has published extensively in these areas and was the co-recipient of the Best Paper Awards at the 7th WWW conference and the 2002 Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) conference. To date, 25 PhD students have completed their degrees under his supervision. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking from 1999 to 2003. He is the co-TPC Chair for Co-Next 2006 and ACM SIGMETRICS 2007. Dr. Ammar is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM.