Abstract:

Virtual Node Abstraction Layers for Programming Mobile ad hoc Networks Nancy Lynch MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL)

Small computers can be equipped with sensors, actuators, and wireless communication devices. Potentially, people, robots, or vehicles could use such hardware to establish mobile ad hoc communication networks and to coordinate in running useful applications. For instance, rescue workers on a devastated island, soldiers engaged in an urban battle, robots in a novel location, or cars on a highway, could set up a mobile ad hoc network, and could use the network to collect and process data, to produce models of the environment, and to plan activities.

However, in practice, application design for mobile ad hoc networks is hard, mainly because the networks are unpredictable and changeable.
How can one simplify the task of designing applications for such networks?

In this talk, I will discuss one answer to this question, which my students, collaborators, and I have developed in several recent papers. Namely, the mobile nodes could be used to emulate a ``virtual node infrastructure'', consisting of computing nodes that are much better behaved than the actual physical nodes. Then applications can be programmed on top of the virtual node infrastructure.

Joint work with:
Matt Brown, Murat Demirbas, Shlomi Dolev, Seth Gilbert, Limor Lahiani, Sayan Mitra, Calvin Newport, Tina Nolte, Elad Schiller, Alex Shvartsman, Mike Spindel, Daniela Tulone, and Jennifer Welch

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