Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ECpE Distinguished Lecture Series 2007-08

Lecture title: "Message Ferrying and Other Short Stories: Mobility-Assisted
Data Delivery in Wireless Networks"

Speaker: Mostafa Ammar, Regents’ Professor, College of Computing, Georgia Tech University

Time: 1:10 to 2 p.m.

Location: Howe Hall, Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium

Abstract: Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are a class of emerging mobile and wireless networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions. These networks have a variety of applications in situations that include communication in natural disaster areas or other hostile environments, deep-space communication, vehicular communication, and non-interactive Internet access in remote areas. In this talk, Ammar will first overview the basic motivation and survey of some initial work in this emerging area. He then will provide an overview of our work which is concerned with the development of a “Message Ferrying” (MF) scheme, inspired by its real life analog, that implements a non-traditional“ store, carry and forward” routing paradigm using node mobility to overcome network partitioning. In the MF scheme, a set of mobile nodes called message ferries takes responsibility for carrying messages between disconnected nodes. Next. he will summarize our recent work on providing a formal understanding of the entire space of wireless and mobile networks. This effort provides a formalism for classifying such networks and a framework that unifies DTNs with more traditional MANETs.

Speaker biography: Mostafa Ammar received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 1985. From 1980 to 1982 he worked at Bell-Northern Research, first as a member of technical staff and then as manager of data network planning. Dr. Ammar’s research interests are in the areas of computer network architectures and protocols, distributed computing systems, and performance evaluation. He is the coauthor of the textbook Fundamentals of Telecommunication Networks. He is also the co-guest editor of April 1997 issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on Network Support for Multipoint Communication. He also was the technical program co-chair for the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2002 Networked Group Communication Workshop, 2006 Co-Next Conference, and 2007 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference.

Dr. Ammar received the 1990 to 1991 Lilly Teaching Fellowship and the 1993 Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the College of Computing. He served as the editor-in-chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (1999-2003) and served on the editorial board of Computer Networks (1992-1999). He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM.