Robust and Ubiquitous Networking Research Group

The research efforts of the RUBINET Group focus on designing network infrastructures that are robust, secure, efficient, and support ubiquitous (mobile) computing. With the rapid technology advancement in wireless sensors, specialized hand-held devices, and smart appliances, the future network infrastructure has to be flexible enough to connect these heterogeneous end nodes over different networks, from the conventional wide-area Internet to wireless and satellite links. For example, consider a "virtual" conferencing session among three locations; two are equipped with virtual reality systems, while the third participant is connected via a mobile handheld device. The first two participants can "move" virtual objects and the dynamic changes in the scenes will be reflected in the corresponding virtual environments. This brings forward the problem of synchronization and real-time access control to different objects. For the third user, an intermediate proxy will be required to transform the highly complex 3D video streams from the virtual environment to 2D video images that can be transmitted over a wireless link with limited bandwidth and viewed on a hand-held device. Our group emphasizes the development of architectures, protocols, and techniques at the network control plane to address these issues. The key design goal is to achieve robustness and high performance in the face of failures, malicious attacks, time-varying load, and heterogeneous application requirements. First, we will need a "service availability" model that captures the failure characteristics of the wide-area network. We propose a cross-inspection of multiple network layers (application, transport, network & data-link) to find vertically integrated solutions, i.e., joint optimization across layers.