Teaching & Research
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
I a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
where I am a member of the NMS
and PDOS research groups. I am
advised by Professors Hari
Balakrishnan and Frans
Kaashoek. In addition to my research here at MIT, I also spend
time in the Internetwork Research
Department of BBN Technologies
working with Craig
Partridge and others.
Research Projects
Migrate - End-to-End Internet Host Mobility
My thesis research at LCS revolves around developing end-to-end
techniques to cope with mobility and disconnectivity in the Internet.
Most current solutions to both problems are actually non-solutions.
Rather than deal with mobile or disconnected hosts, these techniques
simply introduce a well-connected, fixed proxy to perform necessary
functions.
I am currently leading an exploration into an approach to the problem
that uses only end-to-end signaling, called Migrate. In
addition, we are examining generic system services to support extended
periods of disconnection.
Please refer to the Migrate project web
page for additional information, publications, and software.
SPIE
- An IP Traceback Engine
FIRE - An Flexible Networking Environment
FIRE (the Flexible Intra-AS Routing Environment) attempts to
extend standard intra-AS routing protocols, such as OSPF, to consider
multiple user-sepecified metrics rather than just hop count.
Furthermore, FIRE provides the infrastructure necessary for network
administrators to deploy and develop novel routing algorithms. By
providing a basic link state distribution protocol, FIRE frees routing
algorithm developers from being concerned with the complexity of
link-state routing protocols. Instead, FIRE allows multiple,
different routing algorithms to coexist in a network, supporting
diverse classes of traffic.
For additional information and documentation, please refer to the FIRE web pages at BBN.
Inverse Multiplexing
The Advanced Network Architecture
(ANA) group (Dave Clark, Karen Sollins,
and John Wroclawski) was kind enough to harbor me for my first two years
at MIT while I went in search of a deeper purpose.
While there, I worked on a joint project between ANA and Victor Zue's
Spoken Language Systems (SLS)
group, the LCS Marine Communicator
project. The project is developing wireless information gizmos that will allow
marines to interface with live computing applications through speach controlled
visual interfaces, mounted on some sort of handheld or goggle mounted device.
As a first step, I spent a good deal of time working on wide area
networking performance, specifically Cellular Digital Packet Data
(CDPD). I spent the summer of '98 outfitting the LCS Hummer with an
on board network and compute server, which interfaces with the outside
world through an inverse-multiplexing system I designed running over
multiple commercial CDPD modems.
Further details about the striping mechanism can be found in my Global Internet '99 paper.
Location Services
Previously, I spent some time trying to develop a generalized location
service for the Internet. I succeeded in discovering why it hasn't
been done yet--there are some very hard problems to deal with when one
considers location services in the general sense.
If you're interested, here's a short
paper I put together detailing the issues to be dealt with:
Promise - A Distributed Application Management System
Teaching
Moreso than anything else I've done during my collegiate years, my
teaching experiences have fueled my pursuit of a PhD, in hopes of
being a professor someday. While my research has kept me from
teaching anywhere near as much as I would like here at MIT, I spent my
entire Georgia Tech career as a Teaching Assistant for the College of
Computing. In something approaching reverse chronological order, the
courses I've taught include:
6.033 - Computer System Engineering
6.821 - Programming Languages
CS4345 - Computerization and Society
CS2360 - Knowledge Representation and Processing
CS3361 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
CS2430 - Control and Concurrency
- Spring '95 - Prof. Amarnath Mukherjee
CS1501 - Introduction to Computing
snoeren@mit.edu