Information Flows in Wireless Systems


Systems Group

College of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology
 
 

In part funded by the Yamacraw effort











Distributed and embedded systems have limited resources, often due to cost considerations. Furthermore, resource availability and user needs change continuously, driven by user behavior or external changes such as interference in wireless communications. Our group is developing flexible technologies to deal with dynamic resource changes and to exploit and adjust to runtime changes in user needs, with the goal of leveraging both in order to improve the experiences of end users. The target environments of our work include (1) wired homes in which high end data (e.g., video) transfers and computations (e.g., video analysis as needed in home security, or immersive, multi-player games) are ongoing and (2) wireless environments in which end users interact continuously, via portable and wireless devices.

The research areas being investigated address specific devices like PDAs and laptops and the wireless communication media they employ, with research topics ranging from (1) the creation of middleware that promotes the effective distributed programming of these target platforms (both using Java and also investigating higher performance middleware), to (2) extending the Linux kernel at runtime in order to dynamically configure its use in embedded and ubiquitous systems, to (3) investigating specific extensions including those of protocol stacks to improve certain applications' operation. Artifacts resulting from our work include the JECho and ECho middleware systems, the ASAN project investigating how to improve communication co-processor firmware, the ELinux project constructing an extensible Linux for embedded systems, and 'quality channels', a layer on top of Microsoft NT, ELinux , and configurable firmware; this layer exploits the configuration options offered by lower system levels, thereby shielding end users from having to understand system-level details. Finally, runtime monitoring extensions being developed for ELinux observe both communication behavior and processing behavior, so that runtime configuration can take advantage of knowledge about both.
 
 
 

Related Papers

Yamacraw Demo Presentation

Quality-controlled Information Flows in Heterogeneous Systems (MSWord format)

 

 

People

Karsten Schwan
Lynn Daley
Greg Eisenhauer
Jasmina Jancic
Christian Poellabauer
David Robinson
Richard West
Dong Zhou
 
 

Related Projects

Echo
JEcho
ELinux
ASAN
Yamacraw
 

Collaborations

Southern Polytechnic State University
University of Georgia