Victoria Manfredi

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Research Overview

The number and density of wireless networked devices are rapidly increasing (e.g. Cisco projects over 20 billion by the year 2020), while an increasing appetite for higher data rates is pushing wireless technologies (e.g. 5G) towards higher frequency bands (e.g. mmWave) that have shorter communication ranges. Shorter ranges are also characteristic of Internet of Things (IoT) devices due to their low-power requirements. In parallel, wireless networks are evolving from isolated homoge- neous groups of mostly stationary devices to heterogeneous groups of overlapping and interacting stationary and mobile devices, including WiFi-cellular device networks, vehicular sensor networks, wearable health devices synchronizing with cell phones, and microclouds and cloudlets for sharing computational power.

This confluence of increasing device density, communication across different networks, and shorter transmission ranges motivates the use of multi-hop routing, where devices use peer-to-peer communication rather than relying solely on direct communication with infrastructure such as a cellular tower or access points. Because wireless transmissions are less dependable than wired transmissions (due to fading, interference, and multi-path propagation), and because these new wireless networks support user mobility, the connectivity (who can communicate with whom) of such networks is highly dynamic, motivating the need for robust communication protocols that can accommodate such dynamics. The ubiquity of wireless networks and the vast amount of personal data now associated with such networks motivate the need for not just secure, but also private communication proto- cols. The goal of my research is to to develop communication protocols that meet these challenges for mobile wireless networks.



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