Vikas Kawadia

Senior Scientist

Network Research Dept.
BBN Technologies
10 Moulton Street
Cambridge, MA-02138, USA
Email : vkawadia AT bbn DOT com
Web : http://www.ir.bbn.com/~vkawadia


Vikas Kawadia is a Senior Scientist in the Network Research unit at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, MA. He has more than ten years of experience analyzing, designing, and building various types of networks: MANETs, content-centric networks, disruption tolerant networks, cognitive networks etc. He is the lead for content distribution in the ongoing DARPA CBMEN program. He was also the technical lead for content-based networking in the DARPA WNaN program and the DARPA DTN program. He also designed and built a cognitive-radio based data-sharing system for the DARPA ADROIT project. More recently he has been leading several research projects in the ARL NSCTA (Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance) program. These industry-academia collaborative projects include temporal community detection, game theory and mechanism design, and social network analysis. He has authored more than 20 technical papers in communication networks and network science, some of which have more than 500 citations. A recent paper on content-centric networking in MANETs that he co-authored was rated ``Best of Workshop'' at the International Workshop on Tactical MANETs. Vikas has served on technical program committees of several conferences including IEEE SECON and IEEE ICC. He has also served on NSF review panels. Vikas was appointed as an adjunct assistant professor in the college of computer and information science at Northeastern University from 2006 through 2007. Vikas has an MS and a PhD. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Bachelor of Technology in Engineering Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
 [Projects] [Publications] [Professional Activities] [Others]

Selected Publications

  • Vikas Kawadia and Sameet Sreenivasan `` Sequential detection of temporal communities by estrangement confinement ,'' in Nature Scientific Reports, Nov 2012, doi:10.1038/srep00791. Code: kawadia.github.com/estrangement/  
  • Vikas Kawadia, Niky Riga, Jeff Opper and Dhananjay Sampath `` Slinky: An Adaptive Protocol for Content Access in Disruption-Tolerant Ad Hoc Networks ,'' in International Workshop on Tactical Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, held in conjunction with ACM SIGMOBILE MobiHoc 2011. Rated Best of Workshop. 
  • Victor Shnayder, Jeremy Hoon, David C. Parkes and Vikas Kawadia `` Truthful Prioritization Schemes for Spectrum Sharing ,'' in NetEcon '12: Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems and Computation  
  • 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.

    • Projects


    Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NSCTA) ) [2010-]


    The Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS CTA) is a collaborative research alliance between the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), other government researchers, and a Consortium of four research centers: an Academic Research Center (ARC) focused on social/cognitive networks (the SCNARC), an ARC focused on information networks (the INARC), an ARC focused on communications networks (the CNARC), and an Interdisciplinary Research Center (the IRC) focused on interdisciplinary research and technology transition. Its purpose is to perform foundational cross-cutting research on network science, resulting in greatly enhanced human performance for network-enabled warfare and in greatly enhanced speed and precision for complex military operations. I am leading a project exploring foundations of composite networks and also working on several tasks on various aspects of Network Science. These include Market design for wireless resouce sharing, trusted distributed network storage, community detection in composite networks etc.


    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)  [2005-2010]


    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 to quickly simulate various scenarios involving a large number of nodes but without modeling channel and link level chraceristics in detail.

    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.


    Professional Activities


    Others