The mission of our group is to explore, design, develop, and study reliable, scalable, self-managing networks. We have two goals: to engage in fundamental research that improves the state-of-art in networking; and to help microsoft build compelling networking products. Our research spans mobile and wireless networks; wide area internet systems and protocols; network monitoring, inference, and diagnosis, and network performance analysis. We investigate new paradigms of networking, emphasizing scenario-based research with rapid prototyping so that researchers can experiment with actual systems.

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Primary Contact: Victor Bahl
Agarwal, Sharad	Bahl, Victor	Chandra, Ranveer	Dunagan, John
Greenberg, Albert	Kandula, Srikanth	Mahajan, Ratul	Maltz, Dave
Padhye, Jitu	Patel, Parveen	Saroiu, Stefan	Wolman, Alec
Zhang, Ming	Zill, Brian
Affiliate Members
Chou, Philip A.	Donnelly, Austin	Gkantsidis, Christos	Gunawardena, Dinan
Moscibroda, Thomas	Scott, James	Sengupta, Sudipta	Shen, Jacky
Tan, Kun	Thaler, Dave	Zhang, Yongguang

• Z. Morley Mao, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, Summer 2008
• Magdalena Balazinska, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, Summer 2007

• Venkat Padmanabhan, Group Manager, Mobility, Networks, and Systems Group, Microsoft Research India
• Atul Adya, Software Architect, Windows Live Product Group
• Lili Qiu, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Data Center Networking & Platform Services
Trebuchet: is a multi-year cross-lab project focussed on producing the next generation data center software and services. We are interested in developing both the infrastructure (platform software) and outward-facing consumer services. We are experimenting with radical new designs in network architecture, programming abstractions, and performance management tools that scale beyond the enterprise. Trebuchet includes several research projects the cut across various systems and networking research areas, and that are bein pursued in collaboration with Microsoft's Global Foundation Services and Windows Live Core divisions.

Enterprise Network Management
NetHealth: is a network management research program in which end-hosts cooperatively detect, diagnose, and recover from network faults. Unlike existing products we take a end-host centric approach to gathering, aggregating, and analyzing data at all layers of the networking stack for determining the root cause of the problems. NetHealth includes several on-going projects in the wireless and wired space that are being pursued in collaboration with Microsoft’s Management Solutions Division and the MSN product divisions.

Cognitive Wireless Networking
KNOWS: The next generation of wireless networks will include software defined radios, cognitive radios, and multi-radio systems which will co-exist harmoniously while operating over a very wide range of frequencies. Under the umbrella of the KNOWS project we are revisiting "classical" wireless networking problems and designing new solutions that incorporate and build upon recent advances in software and hardware technologies. We are pursuing KNOWS in collaboration with the CCS group, the wireless incubation group, and the Windows PC Echosystems product group.

Consumer Networking & Services
VanLAN & VanCELL: WiFi deployment is becoming denser and in many cases, entire cities are being covered. The question is, given the short range of WiFi and the presence of many interferring sources, can such deployments enable continuous, inexpensive, high-throughput connectivity, by themselves or in conjunction with cellular and WiMax networks? This deployment-based project is about studying the possibility of providing inexpensive and high-throughput wireless connectivity to moving vehicles in urban areas. We are pursing VanLAN & VanCELL in collaboration with Microsoft's Information Technology Group.

• ELDA: ELDA, formerly known as SureMail, addresses the problem of e-mail delay and loss. Over 1 percent of all mail is lost due to infrastructure failures and aggressive spam filtering, and because e-mail loss is a silent problem, you generally aren’t even aware of it! We have built an Outlook 2007 add-in that alerts you of any e-mail sent to you which has become delayed or lost.
• WiFiAds: Delivering location-sensitive content to clients over Wi-Fi networks without requiring the clients to connect to the network. The WiFiAds project is a joint collaboration between the Networking Research Group and the Mobility, Network and Systems Group at Microsoft Research, India.
• Mesh A multi-hop wireless network for residential broadband Internet access in urban and rural communities. We worked on problems related to: range & capacity enhancement; self-management; multi-hop routing; privacy and security, and spectrum management. We pursued these problems in collaboration with Microsoft’s Advanced Strategy & Technology Group.
• CoopNet: Coopnet (Cooperative Networking) is a distributed system that improves the performance and functionality of client-server applications by employing selective use of peer-to-peer (p2p) communications. Our focus was on alleviation of web flash crowds, and streaming media content distribution.
• VirtualWiFi: VirtualWiFi is a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. It enables the user to connect his/her machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card. VirtualWiFi works over Windows XP and the software is available for download to the research community.
• UCom: UCom (or Universal Communicator) is the first multi-radio wireless system to show that wireless system performance and functionality improves significantly when multiple radios work in conjunction in the same network. It proved that such systems are more dependable, more flexible, and allow more innovation than traditional single-radio wireless systems.
• PeerMetric: The goal of PeerMetric is to understand and characterize the network performance of broadband hosts in the Internet. Our work focuses on both characterizing and investigating implications of issues like asymmetric links, non-FIFO packet scheduling, and rate shaping on bandwidth estimation, overlay multicast, etc.
• Yoda: We studied the characteristics of notification and browse services provided by a large commercial web site: MSN Mobile designed specifically for users who access it via their cell-phones and PDAs. The purpose of this, first of its kind, study was to gain insights required to design fast and effective web content for battery and bandwidth constraint devices.
• Dynamics of Large Internet Servers: We analyzed the dynamics of large internet servers, such as the MSNBC News Site, identifying key characteristics that can be exploited in the the design of efficient algorithms for serving content.
• Network Tomography: Infering packet loss characteristics of internet links using server-based measurements. We made inferences based on passive observation of existing end-to-end traffic. We developed three techniques to identify lossy links in the network based on random sampling, linear optimization, and Bayesian inference using gibbs sampling.
• IPv6: Our implementation formed the basis of Microsoft's first IPv6 product stack, which shipped in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. We authored several standards-track Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFCs and made our source code available to the research community.
• Choice: To the best of our knowledge, Choice is the first WiFi based public-area hot-spot network in the world. Our unique edge-server based architecture included support for network discovery, global authentication, user mobility, differentiated services, first-hop security, and location/context services. The underlying techniques are the basis of many commercially deployed hot-spot networks.
• Radar: Radar is the first WiFi signal-strength based indoor positioning system. It proved that RF fingerprinting and environmental profiling with commodity wireless LAN hardware can be used to determine user and machine location inside buildings, thereby enabling indoor location-aware applications.
• WiLib: As part of our "wireless is not Ethernet" project, we developed a user-level library to program wireless network cards dynamically. This level of programming abstraction was previously not available. NDIS WLAN extentions and the more recent Native WiFi programming framework in Windows are based on WiLib. A subset of the original library is still available from UCSD as WRAPI.

Contact Microsoft IP Ventures for licensing information.

• Wireless (Wi-Fi) Hot Spot Network Access The system consists of five key technologies, all of which can be leveraged by the licensee as the basis for a new wireless service, or to augment an existing wi-fi deployment. These are: (1) Global Authenticator (2) Network Admission Server (3) Traffic Control Gateway (4) Client Module and (5) Policy Manager.
• Virtual WiFi: Abstracts a single Wireless LAN card to appear as multiple virtual Wireless LAN cards to the user. Each virtual card can be configured to connect to a different wireless network allowing a user to simultaneously connect her machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card.
• WiFi Location Determination: Microsoft Research developed the original algorithms for location detection using existing 802.11 wireless access points, and has continued to build upon that initial work. We introduced the method of locating a client by measuring the signal strength from multiple wireless access points against a database of previously collected signal strength information at multiple locations and orientations.
• Mesh Connectivity Layer Mesh Network Connectivity Layer technology implements ad-hoc routing and link quality measurement for mesh networks in a module that is a loadable Microsoft Windows driver.
• Smart Antenna Smart Antenna is a low cost directional antenna technology designed for increasing the range, throughput, and consistency of 802.11 networks

Mindswap events, organized by our group, are events where reseachers from industry, academia, and government come together to openly discuss problems and solutions in specfic areas. We have organized five such events with 50 to 60 participants each time. In most case, presentations, videos, notes etc. from all talks and panels are available on on the summit's web site.

• Cognitive Wireless Networking Summit 2007, Snoqualmie, Washington, USA (June 5-6, 2008)
• High Speed TCP Workshop 2007, Redmond, Washington, USA (February 5-6, 2007)
• EdgeNet 2006, Snoqualmie, Washington, USA (June 1-2, 2006)
• Wireless Networking Summit 2006, Goa, India (April 7-8, 2006)
• Self Managing Networks Summit 2005, Kirkland, Washington, USA (June 1-2, 2005)
• Mesh Networking Summit 2004, Snoqualmie, Washington, USA (June 23-24, 2004)

• Microsoft Authorizes Cutting Edge Wi-Fi Technology Licensing, Robert Hoskins, August 2007
• Your Neighborhood Network, Suzanne Ross, June 2004
• Cooperative Networking: Share the Bandwidth, Suzanne Ross, June 2004
• Networks have Evolved, Suzanne Ross
• StudioMIT: A Digital Academic Village, Suzanne Ross, April 2002
• IPv6: The Best of Both Worlds, Suzanne Ross, November 2001
• location, location, location, Suzanne Ross, July 2001
• Wherever you go, there is connectivity, Suzanne Ross, March 2001
• Go Wireless, Go Online at Crossroads, Holly Longdale, February 2001