Ubiquitous connectivity and smart technologies gradually transform homes into Intranet of Things, where a multitude of connected, intelligent devices allow for novel home automation services. Providing new services for home users (e.g., energy saving automations) and Internet Service Providers (e.g., network management and troubleshooting) requires an in-depth analysis of various kinds of data (connectivity, performance, usage) collected from home networks. In this paper, we explore new Machine-to-Machine data analysis techniques that go beyond binary association rule mining for traditional market basket analysis considered by previous studies, to analyze individual device logs of home gateways. We introduce a multidimensional patterns mining framework, to extract complex device co-usage patterns of 201 residential broadband users of an ISP, subscribed to a triple-play service. Our results show that our analytics engine provides valuable insights for emerging use cases such as monitoring for energy efficiency, and “things” recommendation.

In this paper, we analyze a large dataset of passive wireless measurements and obtain insights about wireless performance. We monitor 167 homes continuously for 4 months from the vantage point of the gateway, which allows us to capture all the activity on the home wireless network. We report on the makeup of the home wireless network, traffic activity, and performance characteristics. We find that in most homes, a small number of devices account for most of the observed traffic volume and the bulk of this traffic activity occurs in the evenings. Studying link performance, we find that overall, the vast majority of transmissions are carried out at high data rates and the wireless networks have good coverage. We find a small number of episodes where performance is poor; a few homes have a disproportionate number of poor performance reports. Investigating further, we observe that most of these are not caused by poor coverage (pointing to network interference). Our results significantly add to the understanding of home wireless networks and will help ISPs to understand their subscriber networks.

Contemporary wireless multihop networks operate much below their capacity due to the poor coordination among transmitting nodes. In this paper, we present XPRESS, a cross-layer backpressure architecture designed to reach the capacity of wireless multihop networks. Instead of a collection of poorly coordinated wireless routers, XPRESS turns a mesh network into a wireless switch. Transmissions over the network are scheduled using a throughput-optimal backpressure algorithm. Realizing this theoretical concept entails several challenges, which we identify and address with a cross-layer design and implementation on top of our wireless hardware platform. In contrast to previous work, we implement and evaluate backpressure scheduling over a TDMA MAC protocol, as it was originally proposed in theory. Our experiments in an indoor testbed show that XPRESS can yield up to 128% throughput gains over 802.11.

Contemporary wireless multi-hop networks operate much below their capacity due to the poor coordination among transmitting nodes. In this paper we present XPRESS, a cross-layer backpressure architecture designed to reach the full capacity of wireless multi-hop networks. Instead of a collection of poorly coordinated wireless routers, XPRESS turns a mesh network into a wireless switch. Transmissions over the network are scheduled using a throughput-optimal backpressure algorithm. Realizing this theoretical concept entails several challenges, which we identify and address with a cross-layer design and implementation on top of our wireless hardware platform. In contrast to previous work, we implement and evaluate backpressure scheduling over a TDMA MAC protocol, as it was originally proposed in theory. Our experiments in an indoor testbed show that XPRESS can yield up to 128% throughput gains over 802.11.

The success of broadband residential Internet access is changing the way home users consume digital content and services. Currently, each home service requires the installation of a separate physical box (for instance, the NetFlix box or IPTV set-top-boxes). Instead, we argue for deploying a single box in the home that is powerful and flexible enough to host a variety of home services. In addition, this box is managed by the Internet Service provider and is able to provide service guarantees. We call such a box a service-hosting gateway (SHG), as it combines the functionalities of the home gateway managed by the network service provider with the capability of hosting services. Isolation between such services is ensured by virtualization.

Sectorized antennas provide an attractive solution to increase wireless network capacity through higher spatial reuse. Despite their increasing popularity, the real-world performance characteristics of such antennas in dense wireless mesh networks are not well understood. In this demo, we demonstrate our multi-sector antenna prototypes and their performance through video streaming over an indoor wireless network in the presence of interfering nodes. We use our graphical tool to vary the sender, receiver, and interferer antenna configurations and the resulting performance is directly visible in the video quality displayed at the receiver.

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Time Division Multiplex (TDM) MAC protocol for multi-hop wireless mesh networks using a programmable wireless platform. Extensive research has been devoted to optimal scheduling algorithms for multi-hop wireless networks assuming a perfect TDM MAC protocol. However, the problem of designing and implementing such a protocol has not received due attention. We introduce a design framework that addresses the three main challenges that comprise this problem: (i) How to calibrate and optimize the TDM MAC protocol parameters given a wireless platform, (ii) how to achieve network-wide synchronization with high accuracy, minimal overhead, and most importantly, bounded delay, and (iii) how to integrate the synchronization algorithm with the TDM MAC protocol state machine using minimal hardware resources. We apply our design framework to our platform and evaluate the resulting TDM MAC protocol through controlled experiments in a wireless mesh testbed. The results demonstrate the protocol's ability to provide fairness and graceful performance degradation under packet losses and multi-hop traffic patterns that arise in mesh network deployments.