Keynote speech

Deployment of a Diverse, Outdoor Mobile Testbed
Prof. Brian Neil Levine, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Massachussetts Amherst

Abstract
As municipalities and large organizations deploy large wireless mesh networks, vehicles, pedestrians, and sensor nodes will be able to take advantage of Internet connectivity. Mobile participants inevitably will move outside planned coverage area — or will lose connectivity during power failures and disasters — creating an area where node mobility overlaps but the coverage of each node's wireless links do not. In this talk, we present our research on how to provide disruption tolerant networks that provide connectivity outside wireless infrastructures. Our testbed network, called UMass DieselNet, operates on 40 public transport buses that roam from our campus each day, sparsely covering a 150 square mile area. The buses integrate with our deployed access points in a 4 square mile downtown, with each other as they pass on the road, and with stationary throwboxes. The stationary nodes are solar and battery powered and use a novel multi-tier hardware and power management scheme. Co-led with Prof. Mark Corner, our project has several efforts on DTN routing protocols, securing DTNs against attackers, throwbox design, and application deployment, all of which I will review in the talk.

About the speaker:
Brian Neil Levine received a PhD and a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999 and 1996, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which he joined in 1999. He also directs an NSA Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education at UMass.
Professor Levine's research interests are in the areas of networking and security. In the networking area, his research focuses on mobile systems and peer-to-peer networking. In security, his research is focused on privacy, including anonymous routing protocols. He was awarded an NSF CAREER grant in 2001 for work in peer-to-peer networking. In 2004, he was awarded a Lilly teaching fellowship from UMass Amherst. Levine is an associate editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and was co-chair of the Intl. Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV) in 2006.