Stanford University
Computer Science 444N: Spring 2001

Mobile and Wireless Networks and Applications

Announcements | Overview | Details | Handouts/Slides | Syllabus | Readings | Projects

Announcements

Solutions for the final exam have been posted in the handouts section.

Overview

This course examines how mobility affects networks, systems and applications. Mobility of devices and end-users has behavioral implications at all layers of the Internet protocol stack, from the MAC layer up through the application layer. Handling mobility efficiently requires more information sharing between network layers than is typically considered.

We will look at how mobility affects the layers of the protocol stack as well as how it affects different functional aspects of systems, including security, privacy, file systems, resource discovery, resource management (including energy usage), personal on-line identities, and other areas.

We will investigate emerging applications enabled by mobility. The networks we study will include "traditional" wireless networks, in which an underlying infrastructure is assumed, as well as ad hoc mobile wireless networks, in which nodes may come and go and must form their own network infrastructure on the fly.

In groups, students will design and implement mobile applications and system features of their choosing using network technologies such as WaveLAN, Metricom's Ricochet network, the Palm VII and perhaps Bluetooth.

Prof. Armando Fox will also be giving lectures in the course this year.

Prof. Andrea Goldsmith's course EE 392F: Advanced Topics in Wireless Communications covers lower-level (link and channel access layer) issues in wireless networking.

Details

Lectures:

Tuesday and Thursday, 4:15-5:30 PM, Gates B08 (not televised)

Instructor:

Prof. Mary Baker <mgbaker@cs.stanford.edu>
Gates 414
(650) 725-3711
Office hours: Fridays 2-4 PM

Teaching assistant:

T.J. Giuli <giuli@cs.stanford.edu>
Gates 508
(650) 725-3545
Office hours: Mondays 2-4 PM, Thursday 2-4 PM

Prerequisites:

Satisfactory performance on a short in-class entrance exam that covers parts of CS 240, CS 244A and CS 244B.

Course materials:

Links to most readings and handouts will be provided on this web page.

Email list:

Announcements will be sent to the course email list. To subscribe, send an email with subscribe cs444n-all in the body to mailto:majordomo@lists.stanford.edu?body=subscribe cs444n-allend. Anyone may send email to this list.

Questions:

Please email questions to cs444n-staff@cs.stanford.edu rather than individually emailing Mary or TJ.

Audit policy:

It is unlikely we'll allow many auditors in the class, since the class is intended to be very small and interactive.

Grading:

Class participation (discussions of readings, projects, etc.): 20%
Course project: 50%
Final exam (to be held in class): 30%

Handouts/Slides

• 3 April lecture slides part 1 (Intro) [PowerPoint] [PS]; part 2 (Administrivia) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 5 April lecture slides (Distributed data synchronization) [PowerPoint] [PS];
• 12 April lecture slides (Mobile Device User Interfaces) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 24 April lecture slides (Mobile Routing) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 26 April lecture slides (Mobile Routing, continued) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 1 May lecture slides (TCP for Wireless Networks) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 8 May lecture slides (Mobility at the Person Level) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 10 & 15 May lecture slides (Mobile Internet) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• 17 May lecture slides (Appliance Computing) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• Last year's final exam [Word] [HTML]
• 29 May lecture slides (Wireless network architectures) [PowerPoint] [PS]
• Solutions to this year's final exam.

Syllabus

Tuesday 3 April

Introduction and overview

Course sign-up

Entrance exam (30 minutes, no preparation necessary)

Thursday 5 April

Distributed data synchronization in a weakly connected environment

Tuesday 10 April

Continued: Distributed data synchronization in a weakly connected environment

Thursday 12 April (Fox)

Mobile User Interfaces

Tuesday 17 April

Project proposals, discussion

Thursday 19 April

Project proposal discussion, continued

Tuesday 24 April

Mobile routing

Thursday 26 April

Mobile routing, continued

Tuesday 1 May

Wireless transport protocols

Thursday 3 May

Wireless transport protocols, continued

Tuesday 8 May

Wireless transport protocols, continued again...

Taking people into acccount: Mobile People Architecture

Thursday 10 May

Mobile Internet (Fox)

Tuesday 15 May

Mobile Internet, continued. (Fox)

Thursday 17 May

Appliance Computing (Fox)

Tuesday 22 May

NO CLASS!!

Thursday 24 May

The physical and link layers: Guest lecture from Andrea Goldsmith

Tuesday 29 May

Wireless network architectures

Thursday 31 May

In-class final exam!

Naming in a mobile world

Tuesday 5 June

Project Demo Day!!

Readings

Reading materials for upcoming classes are listed in this section.

General related readings

• D. Milojicic, F. Douglis and R. Wheeler, editors, Mobility: processes, computers, and agents. Addison Wesley, 1999. This book covers mobility from three different perspectives, as suggested by the title. It is a collection of papers with some extra overview material. Many of the papers are now classics in their areas.

5 April: Synchronization of distributed data

• James J. Kistler and M. Satyanarayanan, "Disconnected operation in the coda file system." Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, October 13-16, 1991, Pacific Grove, California. Pages 213-225.
• L. B. Mummert, M. R. Ebling and M. Satyanarayanan, "Exploiting weak connectivity for mobile file access." Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, December 3-6, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado. Pages 143-155.
• D. B. Terry, A. J. Demers, K. Petersen, M. J. Spreitzer, M. M. Theimer and B. B. Welch. "Session guarantees for weakly consistent replicated data." Proceedings of the international conference on parallel and distributed information systems (PDIS), September 1994, Austin, Texas. Pages 140-149.
• Karin Petersen, Mike J. Spreitzer, Douglas B. Terry, Marvin M. Theimer and Alan J. Demers, "Flexible update propagation for weakly consistent replication." Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, October 5-8, 1997, Saint-Malo, France. Pages 288-301.
• Possible standard: SyncML

Related readings

• M. Weiser, "Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing." Communications of the ACM, July 1993. Pages 75-84.
• A. Birrell, R. Levin, R. Needham and M. Schroeder, "Grapevine: an exercise in distributed computing." Communications of the ACM, April 1982. Pages 260-274.
• M. Schroeder, A. Birrell and R. Needham, "Experience with Grapevine: the growth of a distributed system." ACM transactions on computer systems, February 1984. Pages 3-23.
• B. Walker, G. Popek, R. English, C. Kline and G. Thiel, "The LOCUS distributed operating system." Proceedings of the ninth ACM symposium on operating systems principles, October 10-13, 1983, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Pages 49-70.
• L. Huston and P. Honeyman, "Disconnected operation for AFS." Proceedings of the USENIX mobile and location-independent computing symposium, August 2-3, 1993, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pages 1-10.
• P. Reiher, J. Heidemann, D. Ratner, G. Skinner and G. Popek, "Resolving file conflicts in the Ficus file system." Proceedings of the summer 1994 USENIX conference, June 6-10, 1994. Pages 183-195.
• B. Schmidt, M. Lam and J. Northcutt, "The interactive performance of SLIM: a stateless, thin-client architecture." Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on operating systems principles, December 12-15, 1999, Kiawah Island Resort, South Carolina. Pages 32-47.
• M. Baker, J. Hartman, M. Kupfer, K. Shirriff, and J. Ousterhout, "Measurements of a distributed file system." Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on operating systems principles, October 13-16, 1991, Pacific Grove, California. Pages 198-212.
• D. Terry, M. Theimer, K. Petersen, A. Demers, M. Spreitzer, and C. Hauser, "Managing update conflicts in a weakly connected replicated storage system" Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on operating systems principles, December 3-6, 1995, Copper Mountain Resort, Colorado. Pages 172-183.

12 April: Mobile User Interfaces

• C. Lewis and J. Rieman, Task-Centered User Interface Design, published as shareware. (Just read Chapters 1 and 2)
• A. Huang, B. Ling, J. Barton, and A. Fox, Appliance Data Services: Towards an Appliance Computing World, CHI 2001 Workshop, Seattle, WA, April 2001.

24 and 26 April: The network layer: packet routing for mobile hosts (Mobile IP, DHCP/Dynamic DNS, TRIAD, etc.)

• C. Perkins, "Mobile networking through Mobile IP." IEEE internet computing, January 1998. Pages 58-69.
• S. Cheshire and M. Baker, "Internet mobility 4x4." Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '96 conference, Stanford University, August 1996.
• X. Zhao, C. Castelluccia and M. Baker, "Flexible network support for mobile hosts." To appear in MONET special issue on management of mobility in distributed systems, January 2001.
• D. Cheriton and M. Gritter, "TRIAD: a scalable deployable NAT-based internet architecture." Submitted for publication.
• A. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan, "An End-to-End Approach to Host Mobility." Proceedings of MobiCom 2000, August 2000.
• G. Appenzeller, M. Roussopoulos and M. Baker, "User-friendly access control for public network ports." Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '99, March 1999.

Related readings

• A. Miu and P. Bahl, "Dynamic Host Configuration for Managing Mobility between Public and Private Networks", 3rd Usenix Internet Technical Symposium, San Francisco, March 2001.
• J. Ioannidis and G. Maguire, Jr., "The design and implementation of a mobile interetworking architecture." Proceedings of the USENIX winter 1993 technical conference, January 1993. Pages 491-502.
• F. Teraoka, K. Uehara, H. Sunahara and J. Murai, "VIP: a protocol providing host mobility. Communications of the ACM, August 1994.
• C. Perkins, editor. "RFC 2002: IP mobility support." Internet Engineering Task Force, Network Working Group, October 1996.
• C. Perkins, editor, "IP mobility support for IPv4, revised." Internet draft, Internet Engineering Task Force, January 27, 2000.
• D. Johnson and C. Perkins, editors, "Mobility support in IPv6." Internet draft, Internet Engineering Task Force, Mobile IP Working Group, March 10, 2000.
• E. Poger and M. Baker, "Secure public internet access handler (SPINACH)." Proceedings of the USENIX symposium on internet technologies and systems, December 1997.

1 and 3 May: TCP for wireless networks

• H. Balakrishnan, V. Padmanabhan, S. Seshan and R. Katz, "A comparison of mechanisms for improving TCP performance over wireless links." IEEE/ACM transactions on networking, December 1997.
• H. Balakrishnan, V. Padmanabhan and R. Katz, "The effects of asymmetry on TCP performance." ACM mobile networks and applications (MONET), 1999.

Related readings

• K. Fall and S. Floyd, "Simulation-based comparisons of Tahoe, Reno, and SACK TCP." Computer communications review, July 1996.
• K. Lai, M. Roussopoulos, D. Tang, X. Zhao, and M. Baker, "Experiences with a mobile testbed." Proceedings of the second international conference on worldwide computing and its applications (WWCA'98), March 1998.
• Tons of other TCP papers.

8 May: Mobility at the Person Level

• Mema Roussopoulos, Petros Maniatis, Edward Swierk, Kevin Lai, Guido Appenzeller, Mary Baker, "Person-Level Routing in the Mobile People Architecture." Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, October 1999.

10 May: Mobile Internet

• Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Yatin Chawathe, Eric A. Brewer. Adapting to Network and Client Variation Using Active Proxies: Lessons and Perspectives. IEEE Personal Communications (invited submission), August 1998.
• Rohit Khare. W* Effect Considered Harmful, published as independent report for 4K Associates Consulting.

15 May: Mobile Internet

• End-to-End Arguments in System Design ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2(4), Nov. 1984, pp. 277-288.

17 May: Appliance Computing

• Making Computers Disappear: Appliance Data Services To appear in Mobicom 2001

24 May: Physical and Link Layers

• A. Goldsmith, "Wireless networks." Chapter 7 of J. Walrand and P. Varaiya, High-performance communication networks, Second edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2000. Pages 305-361. (Available outside my office - 414 Gates.)

29 May: Wireless/mobile network environments

• M. Weiser, "The computer for the twenty-first century." Scientific American, September 1991. Pages 66-.
• B. R. Badrinath, J. Borras, and R. Yates, "The Infostations challenge: balancing cost and ubiquity in delivering wireless data." Submitted for publication, August 1999.
• J. Broch, D. Maltz, D. Johnson, Y.-C. Hu, and J. Jetcheva, "A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols." In Proceedings of the fourth annual ACM/IEEE international conference on mobile computing and networking, October 1998, Dallas, Texas.

Related readings

• S. Marti, T. Giuli, K. Lai and M. Baker, "Mitigating routing misbehavior in mobile ad hoc networks." Proceedings of the sixth annual international conference on mobile computing and networking, August 2000, Boston, Massachusetts.
• M. Satyanarayanan, "Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges." To appear in IEEE Personal Communications, 2001. [Note, this is a draft and the final copy may change. The likely publication date is August, 2001.]

Rest to be announced.

Projects

Here is this quarter's project page (so far).
Also see the projects from last year for some ideas.

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