Seminars & Colloquia
Ashish Patro
University of Wisconsin - Madison
"Building Blocks to Understand Wireless Experience"
Monday March 16, 2015 09:30 AM
Location: 3211, EBII NCSU Centennial Campus
(Visitor parking instructions)
In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the deployment of wireless networks such as WiFi and 3G/4G cellular networks (e.g. HSPA, EVDO, LTE). Simultaneously, there has been a rapid growth in the use of wireless-enabled client devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. As a consequence of these developments, the complex interactions resulting from the diversity of applications, devices and wireless network deployments in this ecosystem cause many problems that impact the end user's experience. Thus, my graduate research work has been motivated by the following questions: (i) With the rapid proliferation of wireless networks and devices, how can we understand the impact of network and device related factors on application experience? and (ii) How can we leverage various "vantage points", i.e., wireless network infrastructure, client devices and mobile application to estimate and manage various RF, network and application level parameters in the wild?
In this talk, I'll present my work on a WiFi router platform (WiSe) to understand wireless performance in dense residential WiFi deployments, such as multi-tenant apartment buildings. I conducted an 8 month long study in collaboration with Internet ISPs and deployed 30 WiFi Access Points across different locations in Madison, Wisconsin. I'll also talk about a Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework, COAP that leverages a cloud-based controller and Open APIs to improve residential WiFi performance. Finally, I'll present a brief summary of a mobile analytics toolkit (Insight) for Android and iOS based mobile applications. This toolkit was deployed by two popular iOS and Android mobile applications for more than 3 years, resulting in a footprint of more than 1 million unique users and 60 million sessions. I'll also briefly touch upon my work on diagnosing non-WiFi interference, which received widespread press coverage (http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/09/24/2243213/wi-fi-cards-can-now-detect-microwave-ovens) and the WiSense Android application that got featured on Google's Play Store (http://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/promotion_3000109_geek_tools).
Ashish Patro is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, advised by Prof. Suman Banerjee. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in 2009. His broad research interests are in the areas of mobile applications and systems, wireless networks and software defined networking. His research work has focused on building tools and frameworks for interference management in wireless networks, managing wireless performance in home environments as well as enabling application and network performance analytics in large mobile application deployments. His work has also been supported by the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship (2012 - 2014). He won the second prize at the InterDigital Innovation Challenge 2012 and his work on WiSense was featured by Google on the Play Store. His work on mobile application analytics won the best paper award at MobiGames 2012 and was a best paper nominee at CoNEXT 2013.
Host: Dr. Harry Perros, CSC