Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches, well known from IT disciplines, are beginning to excite the networking and networked systems community. Of late, we are seeing a huge excitement about applying AI and ML to networked systems. Is this merely a hype? Are there use cases and genuine applications that could lead to real deployment and practical solutions? What are the key challenges in applying AI and ML to networked systems? Can researchers and practitioners in communication networks and networked systems tap into machine learning and AI techniques to optimize network architecture, control and management, leading to increased automation in network operations? Can researchers and practitioners in the AI community explore synergy with networking researchers to optimize network architecture and design? The above are some of the questions that would be addressed during the panel discussion. The objective of the panel discussion would be to tap the minds of the global experts in order to understand the merits and limitations and the future landscape in the intersection of networking/networked systems and AI/ML.

Bluetooth, a wireless technology based on a frequency-hopping physical layer, enables portable devices to form short-range wireless ad hoc networks. Bluetooth hosts are not able to communicate unless they have previously discovered each other through synchronization of their timing and frequency-hopping patterns. Thus, even if all nodes are within proximity of each other, only those nodes which are synchronized with the transmitter can hear the transmission. To support any-to-any communication, nodes must be synchronized so that the pairs of nodes, which can communicate with each other, form a connected graph. Using Bluetooth as an example, we first provide deeper insights into the issue of link establishment in frequency-hopping wireless systems. We then introduce an asynchronous distributed protocol that begins with nodes having no knowledge of their surroundings and terminates with the formation of a connected network topology satisfying all constraints posed by Bluetooth. An attractive protocol feature is its ease in implementation using the communication primitives offered by the Bluetooth Specification.

Wireless LANs are becoming increasingly popular today, particularly those based on IEEE 802.11b standard. We study the problem of determining the location of a mobile device, which is communicating through a WLAN. We exploit the fact that the strength of the signals that a device will receive from different access points will vary with location. We build a database of signal strength information for various locations, and use this information to determine which location a given test data comes from. The problem is complicated because RF signals are affected by the noise, interference, multi-path effect, and random movement in the environment. We find that in spite of this randomness, the signal information is sufficient to detect the position of mobile device with certain error margin.

Wireless ad hoc networks have been a growing area of research. While there has been considerable research on the topic of routing in such networks, the topic of topology creation has not received due attention. This is because almost all ad hoc networks to date have been built on top of a single channel, broadcast based wireless media, such as 802.11 or IR LANs. For such networks the distance relationship between the nodes implicitly (and uniquely) determines the topology of the ad hoc network. Bluetooth is a promising new wireless technology, which enables portable devices to form short-range wireless ad hoc networks and is based on a frequency hopping physical layer. This fact implies that hosts are not able to communicate unless they have previously discovered each other by synchronizing their frequency hopping patterns. Thus, even if all nodes are within direct communication range of each other, only those nodes which are synchronized with the transmitter can hear the transmission. To support any-to-any communication, nodes must be synchronized so that the pairs of nodes (which can communicate with each other) together form a connected graph. Using Bluetooth as an example, this paper first provides deeper insights into the issue to link establishment in frequency hopping wireless systems. It then introduces the Bluetooth topology construction protocol (BTCP), an asynchronous distributed protocol for constructing scatternets which starts with nodes that have no knowledge of their surroundings and terminates with the formation of a connected network satisfying all connectivity constraints posed by the Bluetooth technology. To the best of our knowledge, the work presented in this paper is the first attempt at building Bluetooth scatternets using distributed logic and is quite "practical" in the sense that it can be implemented using the communication primitives offered by the Bluetooth 1.0 specifications.

Proximity awareness in Bluetooth technology is implemented via an asymmetric point to point "sender-receiver" protocol where "senders" are trying to discover "receivers" in the vicinity. This paper tries to shed some light on the link formation delay by first identifying the delay bottlenecks in the asymmetric neighborhood discovery process and then discussing the factors that affect certain parameter decisions. A symmetric technique for establishing ad hoc connectivity is introduced which imposes each node to alternate between the "sender" and "receiver" state in a random fashion. The results show that the connection establishment delay can be reduced if appropriate decisions are made in the choice of parameters.

Palmtop computers are rapidly becoming the popular platform of choice for running personal productivity applications, but their networking capabilities are still lagging behind user expectations.Due to memory size, cost, and power considerations most palmtop computers support only limited form of point-to-point communication, namely, connection via a PSTN modem or a serial RS-232 cable.Due to wired point-to-point nature of these interfaces, satisfactory solutions for multi-point communication and direct LAN connection do not yet exist..The BlueSky project aims at providing a low-cost, lowpower, indoor RF wireless networking solution for handheld devices.Our solution consists of two components; a BlueSky wireless attachment that plugs into the standard serial port of any palmtop device, and a LAN access point that acts as a layer 213 bridge between the wireless and the wired part of the network.Palmtop devices use dialup networking software and PPP to connect via BlueSky to the network.BlueSky enables MobileIP style seamless roaming between access points without requiring any changes to the communication stack of plamtop devices.Our roaming enhancements to PPP are implemented in the PPP server, the access point, and the BlueSky attachment, all of which are completely transparent to the palmtop device.In this paper, we present our design rationale and implementation experience of building the BlueSky system.We show in what ways low cost, low power, and form factor constraints affect the choice of protocols and function placement in wireless networking systems.We use PPP based mobility solution as an example to illustrate what design adjustments and compromises one has to make to build a working solution.Based on our experience, we recommend making a slight modification to the dialup networking stack of palmtop computers.Our proposed modification offers an efficient, lower cost, and lighter-weight wireless networking solution which is particularly attractive for enabling mobility over emerging short range, low power wireless technologies, such as IrDA, HomeRF and Bluetooth.Permission Lo make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the tirst page.To copy otherWe, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists.rcquircs prior specific permission and/or a fee.

Mobile nodes of the future will be equiped with multiple network interfaces to take advantage of overlay networks, yet no current mobility systems provide full support for the simultaneous use of multiple interfaces. The need for such support arises when multiple connectivity options are available with different cost, coverage, latency and bandwidth characteristics, and applications want their data to flow over the interface that best matches the characteristics of the data. We present an architecture called transport layer mobility that allows mobile nodes to not only change their point of attachment to the Internet, but also to control which network interfaces are used for the different kinds of data leaving from and arriving at the mobile node. We implement our transport layer mobility scheme using a split connection proxy architecture and a new technique called TCP splice that gives split connection proxy systems the same end to-end semantics as normal TCP connections.

Unlike wired networks, packets transmitted on wireless channels are often subject to burst errors which cause back to back packet losses. Most wireless LAN link layer protocols recover from packet losses by retransmitting lost segments. When the wireless channel is in a burst error state, most retransmission attempts fail thereby causing poor utilization of the wireless channel. Furthermore, in the event of multiple sessions sharing a wireless link, FIFO packet scheduling can cause the HOL blocking effect, resulting in unfair sharing of the bandwidth. This observation leads to a new class of packet dispatching methods which explicitly take the wireless channel characteristics into consideration in making packet dispatching decisions. We compare a variety of channel state dependent packet (CSDP) scheduling methods with a view towards enhancing the performance of the transport layer sessions. Our results indicate that by employing a CSDP scheduler at the wireless LAN device driver level, significant improvement in the channel utilization can be achieved in typical wireless LAN configurations.

The authors examine the performance implications of providing reliability in conjunction with multicast transport over a high speed wide area network. They use a block based acknowledgement and selective retransmission protocol to evaluate the impact of the loss rate and the multicast tree topology on the achievable throughput. Their results show that even when the buffer overflow probability at switches and receivers is low, the cumulative loss probability seen by a source may be quite high. They also demonstrate that the average throughput increases significantly if the transport protocol delivers packets to the application layer out-of-sequence. They investigate the scaling properties of the error control mechanism and show that the multicast tree topology that results in minimum transfer time is not necessarily the same as the one constructed using minimal bandwidth or shortest path algorithms.>

An ad-hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of Mobile Hosts without the required intervention of any centralized Access Point. In this paper we present an innovative design for the operation of such ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of the design is to operate each Mobile Host as a specialized router, which periodically advertises its view of the interconnection topology with other Mobile Hosts within the network. This amounts to a new sort of routing protocol. We have investigated modifications to the basic Bellman-Ford routing mechanisms, as specified by RIP [5], to make it suitable for a dynamic and self-starting network mechanism as is required by users wishing to utilize ad hoc networks. Our modifications address some of the previous objections to the use of Bellman-Ford, related to the poor looping properties of such algorithms in the face of broken links and the resulting time dependent nature of the interconnection topology describing the links between the Mobile Hosts. Finally, we describe the ways in which the basic network-layer routing can be modified to provide MAC-layer support for ad-hoc networks.