My Research Interests

I am interested in improving the capacity and quality of communication networks by bridging together different types of networks and technologies. As the demand for network services continues to grow, networks operators need to continually expand the capacity of their networks. One approach is to throw capacity at the problem, but this is not a cost effective approach with respect to the evolving communication patterns. Thanks to powerful mobile devices and online social networks, users can create vast amounts of new content and disseminate it far beyond their social circle. These communications are logically between users, and so lateral with respect to hierarchical network organization and, as a result, are often forwarded over inefficient routes. Additionally, many applications, such as video chat and massively multiplayer games, require low latency from the network, as well as high bandwidth.

I believe that in order to keep up with the growing traffic volume and to efficiently meet the needs of lateral and real-time traffic, we need to think harder about how to bring all available network resources online. Instead of thinking about different network technologies and topologies separately, we think of them as concurrently available heterogeneous resources and figure out how to use them together. My research attempts to identify and exploit symbiotic relationships between different types of connectivity and to design communication protocols that explicitly rely on heterogeneous connectivity.

Publications

Vinod Kone, Mariya Zheleva, Mike P. Wittie, Ben Y. Zhao, Elizabeth M. Belding, Haitao Zheng, Kevin C. Almeroth. "AirLab: Consistency, Fidelity and Privacy in Wireless Measurements," To appear in Computer Communications Review, 2010 as an Editorial Note

Mike P. Wittie, Veljko Pejovic, Lara Deek, Kevin C. Almeroth, Ben Y. Zhao "Exploiting Locality of Interest in Online Social Networks," in ACM CoNEXT, 2010
paper press coverage in IEEE Spectrum

Vinod Kone, Mariya Zheleva, Mike P. Wittie, Zengbin Zhang, Xiaohan Zhao, Ben Y. Zhao, Elizabeth M. Belding, Haitao Zheng, Kevin C. Almeroth "AirLab: Distributed Infrastructure for Wireless Measurements," (poster) in USENIX NSDI, 2010
paper

Mike P. Wittie, Kevin C. Almeroth, Elizabeth M. Belding, Ivica Rimac, Volker Hilt "Internet Service in Developing Regions Through Network Coding," in IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON), 2009.
paper | slides | poster

Mike P. Wittie, Khaled A. Harras, Kevin C. Almeroth, Elizabeth M. Belding, "On The Implications of Routing Metric Staleness in Delay Tolerant Networks," in Computer Communications, 2009.
paper

Lara B. Deek, Kevin C. Almeroth, Mike P. Wittie, Khaled A. Harras, "Exploiting Parallel Networks Using Dynamic Channel Scheduling," in The Fourth International Wireless Internet Conference (WICON), 2008.
paper

Mike P. Wittie, BrettStone-Gross, Kevin C. Almeroth, Elizabeth M. Belding, "MIST: Cellular data network measurement for mobile applications," in Fourth International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks and Systems (BROADNETS), 2007.
paper | slides

Vadim A. Slavin, Michael Polyakov, Mark Quilling, Mike P. Wittie, Matthew Andrews, "Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) protocols evaluation framework," in Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), 2007.
paper

Khaled A. Harras, Mike P. Wittie, Kevin C. Almeroth, Elizabeth M. Belding, "Paranets: A parallel network architecture for challenged networks," in IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), 2007.
paper

OPNET University Program

Much of my research is made possible by the free OPNET licenses made available through OPNET's University Program.