Professor Rudra Dutta, NC State Posts

Following up on the highly successful 2014 NCSU CentMesh Drones Challenge, which concluded in April 2014, we kicked off another year-long student challenge for 2014-15. This time, it was not only a programming challenge, but also a challenge to design and hone some of the drone’s subsystems. In addition, there was a specific real-world mission – to design and demonstrate a drone capable of aiding a firefighter by going into burning buildings as advance guard. Several teams completed the challenge, which was administered as a Special Topic course, conducted by Dr. Dutta, Dr. Mihail Sichitiu (ECE), Dr. Edgar Lobaton (ECE), or Dr. Larry Silverberg (MAE). More details are available from the Firefighting Drone Challenge webpage. We continue to be interested in guiding motivated students to build on the platforms produced for even more increased realism.

for getting a paper accepted at the CoolSDN Workshop co-located with ICNP 2014. Rob’s paper presents his work on designing and demonstrating a seamless general-purpose in-network service insertion mechanism integration into OpenFlow. He made a short video describing this work – see the SDN Labs link below.

Dr. Dutta delivered an invited talk in Summer, 2014, at the Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit at the world-famous Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. The talk was on the evolution of Internet architecture, with special reference to network-neutrality issues, and the emergence of the service-oriented Internet. The talk was on the kind invitation of Dr. Bhabani P Sinha, head of the ACMU.

for successfully defending his M.S. thesis! Kasyap not only did very challenging work for his MS thesis, but also was one of the two students who between them enabled the entire CentMesh Drones Challenge 2014. He is moving on to employment at Citrix, and has a bright career ahead of him.

ChoiceNet is the name of an architectural vision to support choice as the central aspect of the Internet architecture. funded by a large multi-university FIA grant from NSF. A recent ACM Computer Communications Review paper reviews the overall architecture and visions of ChoiceNet.

The first ever programming challenge at NCSU on unmanned aerial computing platforms culminated in a day-long final challenge in which the finalist teams took turns running their programs on CentMesh drones to see if they code would – ahem – fly. The six-month long programming challenge was hosted and made possible by the CentMesh research and teaching facility we have built over the last few years.

Can (“Jon”) successfully defended his doctoral thesis in April, 2014. His primary work has been in Verification Service Architecture, an aspect of the ChoiceNet project, which provides a framework and prototype for third-party verification services in the future Internet, as well as study of some potential innovative such services. He goes on to a research job with Riverbed Software, in Sunnyvale, CA.

Trisha successfully defended her doctoral thesis in April, 2014. Her primary work has been in Petal Routing, which uses several different types of geo-diverse or diffuse multipaths to provide network-layer redundancy in the face of jamming, and most recently, in a linear system modeling of these and other similar wireless multihop routing systems. She goes on to a research job with Aruba Networks, in Sunnyvale, CA.

“Designing for Network and Service Continuity in Wireless Mesh Networks”, co-authored by former student Parth H. Pathak and Dr. Dutta, published by Springer, just came out. The book focuses on performance predictability of the wireless mesh network paradigm, and considerations in designing networks from the perspective of survivability and service continuity metrics.

ACM covered ChoiceNet in the August 13, 2012 issue of ACM TechNews, referring to the SIGCOMM short paper.