Vikas Kawadia

Network Scientist
Internetwork Research Dept.
BBN Technologies
10 Moulton Street
Cambridge, MA-02138, USA

Phone : +1-617-873-2251
Fax : +1-617-873-6091
Email : vkawadia AT bbn DOT com
Web : http://www.ir.bbn.com/~vkawadia


Vikas Kawadia is a Network Scientist in the Internetwork Research Department at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, MA. He has worked on several aspects of mobile ad hoc networks, delay/disruption tolerant networks, content based networks, software radios, virtualization technologies and computer forensics. Many of these efforts include building and deploying working systems.

He obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Sep 2004. He also received his MS degree from the same department in 2001. Prior to this, he received his B.Tech in Engineering Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1999. He is a recipient of the E.A. Reid Award from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research  focused on wireless ad hoc networks and includes design, analysis, implementation and experimentation of protocols.

Vikas has served on technical program committees of several conferences including IEEE SECON and IEEE ICC. He has also served on NSF panels. He regularly reviews papers for various journals and conferences.

Vikas was appointed as an adjunct assistant professor in the college of computer and information science at Northeastern University from 2006 through 2007. He has taught graduate courses on Computer networks at Northeastern.

 [Projects] [Publications] [Professional Activities] [Others]

Projects


PIRANA (WAND: WNaN adaptive network development) [2007-]


The goal of this DARPA project is to build a large-scale  MANET with very inexpensive nodes (by military standards), with up to four transceivers, each of which is highly frequency agile, and has a spectrum detector and simple MIMO capability. PIRANA will support multi-radio, multichannel dynamic spectrum access, unicast and multicast traditional and disruption tolerant routing and content based access. I am leading the Content-based access effort on this project. We have designed a protocol which provides a DHT abstraction for potentially disconnected MANETs. We are working towards a 40 radio demonstration in Dec 2008, a 100 radio demonstration in Dec 2009, and a 1000 radio demonstration in Dec 2010.


ADROIT (Adaptive Dynamic Open Source Intelligent Team) [2005-2007]


The goal of this project was to accelerate the use of software radios for wireless network research. As any frustrated  (mobile ad hoc) wireless network researcher can tell you, the lack of flexibility in radio firmware severely limits experimentation with MAC layer protocols. You have to live with what is in the radio (typically 802.11 for most researchers). ADROIT attempted to change that by significantly enhancing the open source GNU Radio software to send/receive packets, control parameters and many basic radio functions, except in software. The ADROIT system consists of the GNU USRP hardware, RX and TX chain software, a MAC framework for easy development of MAC protocols which is currently instantiated to a simple baseline, subnet layer routing based on Hazy Sighted Link State routing, and the standard IP stack above it. Unfortunately, this project did not run to its eventual completion for a number of reasons unrelated to the project itself. However, some groups have picked up whatever BBN did and are extending it. ADROIT was funded by DARPA IPTO and included BBN (prime), Kansas U., MIT, UCLA, and Eric Blossom as team members.


SPINDLE (Disruption Tolerant Networking)  [2005-]


This ongoing project is perhaps the largest funded effort on the topic of Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). The DTN idea, first put forth in this Internet Draft, seeks to provide data communications in so-called "intermittently connected" networks, where no end-to-end path may be available at any time. Conventional wired and MANET-based networks are designed around the assumption of having such an end-to-end path. A DTN utilizes "bundles" which can be persistently stored and handed over from node to node, so that as long as there is an end-to-end path "over time", the bundle can be delivered. SPINDLE is building on the DTNRG working group's work, helping define a flexible architecture, researching new adaptive routing algorithms, the use of content-based access in this environment, and late binding of names. I did some initial work on content-based access in such environments including design, prototype development and demonstration. The protocol worked by prioritizing spreading of information based on a notion of its current utility. SPINDLE is funded by DARPA ATO.

FRED: Forensic RAM extraction device [2004-2006]

 Investigative agencies can usually capture information on non-volatile disks but the information in RAM is typically lost. This project built  a hardware device for extracting the volatile memory from a running computer. The device does not run any software on the target computer's processor to avoid being detected. My contributions include a tool for reconstructing and extracting operating system data structures for the Linux OS from a raw dump of the physical memory.

MINAS: Minas is not another simulator

Minas is a virtual OS based network simulation/environment which enables shared code simulations, i.e., simulations using the exact same code base which is used on the real testbed/system.

NetSimpy

NetSimpy is a discrete event simulator written in python. We wanted to quickly simulate various scenarios involving a large number of nodes but did not particularly care about channel and link level details. I wrote this along with Niky Riga. Incidentally, python is among my favorite languages.

Transmit power control protocols in Linux

We developed transmit power control protocols for ad hoc networks and implemented then in the Linux kernel.

ASL (Ad hoc Support Library) project web page

ASL is a userspace library which assists in  implementation of ondemand routing protocols

TCP experiments over 802.11 ad hoc networks

We set up an ad hoc network testbed and ran several experiments to characterize TCP performance  and suggest improvements.

Publications

  • Vikas Kawadia and P. R. Kumar, `` Principles and protocols for power control in ad hoc networks,'' in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Special Issue on Ad Hoc Networks, Vol 1, 2005. 
  • Vikas Kawadia and P. R. Kumar, ``A cautionary perspective on cross layer design,'' in IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine, Feb 2005.

  • Vikas Kawadia and P. R. Kumar, ``Experimental Investigations into TCP Performance over Wireless Multihop Networks ,'' in SIGCOMM 2005 - Workshop on Experimental approaches to wireless network design and analysis (E-WIND-05)

  • Vikas Kawadia and P. R. Kumar, `` Power Control and Clustering in Ad Hoc Networks ,'' in IEEE INFOCOM (The IEEE Conference on Computer Communications) 2003.

  • Vikas Kawadia, Yongguang Zhang and Binita Gupta, `` System Services for Implementing Ad-Hoc Routing: Architecture, Implementation and Experiences ,'' in MOBISYS 2003: The First International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services.

  • Swetha Narayanaswamy, Vikas Kawadia, R. S. Sreenivas, and P. R. Kumar, `` Power Control in Ad Hoc Networks : Theory, Architecture, Algorithm and Implementation of the COMPOW protocol. ,'' in European Wireless Conference, 2002.

  • Vikas Kawadia, Yongguang Zhang and Binita Gupta, ``System services for implementing ad hoc routing protocols,'' at the International Workshop for Ad Hoc Networking, Aug 2002.

  • Vikas Kawadia, Swetha Narayanaswamy, R. Rozovsky, R. S. Sreenivas, and P. R. Kumar, ``Protocols for media access control and power control in wireless networks,'' in IEEE Conf. on Decision & Control, 2001.


  • Gregory D. Troxel, Eric Blossom, Steve Boswell, Armando Caro, Isidro Castineyra, Alex Colvin, Tad Dreier, Joseph B. Evans, Nick Goffee, Karen Haigh, Talib Hussain, Vikas Kawadia (BBN), David Lapsley, Carl Livadas, Alberto Medina, Joanne Mikkelson, Gary J. Minden, Robert Morris, Craig Partridge, Vivek Raghunathan, Ram Ramanathan, Cesar Santivanez, Thomas Schmid, Dan Sumorok, Mani Srivastava, Bob Vincent, David Wiggin, Alexander M. Wyglinski, Sadaf Zahedi,  ``Adaptive Dynamic Radio Open-source Intelligent Team (ADROIT): Cognitively-controlled Collaboration among SDR Nodes,'' in First IEEE Workshop on Networking Technologies for Software Defined Radio (SDR) Networks, 2006.


  • Rajesh Krishnan, Prithwish Basu, Joanne M. Mikkelson, Christopher Small, Ram Ramanathan, Daniel W. Brown, John R. Burgess, Armando L. Caro, Matthew Condell, Nicholas C. Goffee, Regina Rosales Hain, Richard E. Hansen, Christine E. Jones, Vikas Kawadia, David P. Mankins, Beverly I. Schwartz, William T. Strayer, Jeffrey W. Ward, David P. Wiggins, and Stephen H. Polit, "The SPINDLE Disruption-Tolerant Networking System," Proceedings of IEEE MILCOM 2007, Orlando, FL, USA, October 29-31, 2007.


  • Troxel, Gregory D.; Caro, Armando; Castineyra, Isidro; Goffee, Nick; Haigh, Karen Zita; Hussain, Talib; Kawadia, Vikas; Rubel, Paul G.; Wiggins, David, "Cognitive Adaptation for Teams in ADROIT," Global Telecommunications Conference, 2007. GLOBECOM '07. IEEE , vol., no., pp.4868-4872, 26-30 Nov. 2007

  • Gregory D. Troxel, Eric Blossom, Steve Boswell, Armando Caro, Isidro Castineyra, Alex Colvin, Tad Dreier, Joseph B. Evans, Nick Goffee, Karen Zita Haigh, Talib Hussain, Vikas Kawadia, David Lapsley, Carl Livadas, Alberto Medina, Joanne Mikkelson, Gary J. Minden, Robert Morris, Craig Partridge, Vivek Raghunathan, Ram Ramanathan, Paul G. Rubel, Cesar Santivanez, Thomas Schmid, Dan Sumorok, Mani Srivastava, Robert S. Vincent, David Wiggins, Alexander M. Wyglinski and Sadaf Zahedi, ``Enabling open-source cognitively-controlled collaboration among software-defined radio nodes,'' in Computer Networks Volume 52, Issue 4, , Cognitive Wireless Networks, 14 March 2008, Pages 898-911.

  • Book Chapter: Swetha Narayanaswamy, Vikas Kawadia, R. S. Sreenivas, and P. R. Kumar, "Power Control in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: An Architectural Solution for a Melee of Multiple Agents, Cost Criteria, and Information Patterns" in "Modeling, Control and Optimization of Complex Systems", edited by Weibo Gong and Leyuan Shi, Springer, 2002, 320 p., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-4020-7208-6

    • Professional Activities


    Others