(Yet) Another Look at Ad Hoc Networks

Speaker: Dr. J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, University of California-Santa Cruz
Abstract: The protocols in today's ad hoc networks still reflect the severe memory and processing constraints imposed on computing equipment dedicated to communication tasks 40 years ago. As a result, protocols today are organized into a stack in which each protocol layer operates independently of other protocols, receiving services from the lower layer and providing services to the upper layer. For the same reason, processing and storage ``inside'' the network is kept to a minimum, with the provision of more sophisticated processing and storage of content at the edges of the network (i.e., hosts) and each packet is asked to carry all the control information for each layer that must process it in the header of the layer. Given the small scale of the ARPANET, choosing a scalable approach to naming, addressing and routing was not a priority. Unfortunately, for historical rather than technical reasons, globally unique identifiers denoting the point at which hosts ``attach'' to the network are being used today to both name the destinations inside the network and specify routes to them in routing tables. In this talk, we investigate enabling the invisible Internet by re-examining commonly held notions of the Internet architecture and its protocols, namely: (a) the nature of protocol stacks and signaling; (b) the way in which packet switching should be accomplished when in-network storage and processing are affordable; (c) the relationships among naming, routing and end-to-end connectivity; and (d) the way in which communication takes place in a network.
Biography: J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico in 1977, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He holds the Jack Baskin Chair of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and is a Principal Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Prior to joining UCSC in 1993, he was a Center Director at SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. He has been a Visiting Professor at Sun Laboratories and a Principal of Protocol Design at Nokia. Dr. Garcia-Luna-Aceves has published a book, more than 300 papers, and 12 U.S. patents. He has directed 25 Ph.D. theses and 19 M.S. theses since he joined UCSC in 1993. He has been the General Chair of the IEEE SECON 2005 Conference; Program Co-Chair of ACM MobiHoc 2002 and ACM Mobicom 2000; Chair of the ACM SIG Multimedia; General Chair of ACM Multimedia '93 and ACM SIGCOMM '88; and Program Chair of IEEE MULTIMEDIA '92, ACM SIGCOMM '87, and ACM SIGCOMM '86. He has served in the IEEE Internet Technology Award Committee, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal Committee, and the National Research Council Panel on Digitization and Communications Science of the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board. He has been on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, the Multimedia Systems Journal, and the Journal of High Speed Networks. He received the SRI International Exceptional-Achievement Award in 1985 and 1989, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Presentation On: Friday,31 March, 2006,
11:00 a.m. in room 1115, CSIC
Videotape: QuickTime streaming video