Wireless Networking and Full Duplex Wireless

We research how to build robust, efficient wireless networks. Our work focuses on experimental and scientific results from real-world networks: how do they behave, why, and how can one leverage these behaviors to build better systems? This work includes detailed experimental studies of wireless networks, mathematical models to describe the behavior we observe, protocols which build on this deeper understanding, and novel radio designs for full duplex wireless that will enable a new generation of protocols. While there have been many advances in wireless communications theory and low-power protocol design, in practice the two fields see little overlap. We extensively measure wireless networks to narrow this gap. We specifically focus on: - studying low power wireless link behavior, - understanding the root causes of packet success and failure, - evaluating how best those causes can be predicted or detected, - understanding the implications of observations from this study to wireless networking protocols, and - adapting existing theoretic models for realistic analysis and simulations. We've designed numerous wireless protocols that build on these experimental findings, including the Collection Tree Protocol for ultra-efficient data collection from a wireless mesh, the DIP protocol for ultra-efficient data dissemination into a wireless mesh, and Grant-to-Send, a novel media access primitive that prevents different protocols from interfering. Finally, we've successfully designed a single channel full-duplex wireless transceiver. The design uses a combination of RF and baseband techniques to achieve full-duplexing with minimal effect on link reliability. We've introduced Signal Inversion Cancellation, a technique for self-interference cancellation using an RF signal inversion circuit, combined with passive attenuation and delay lines. Simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency band opens opportunities to design new protocols to improve the performance of the network. Janus is an example of such a protocol which redesigns the Media Access Control (MAC) layer.

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Publications

Receiving Colliding LoRa Packets with Hard Information Iterative Decoding. Raejoon Jung and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference and Exhibition on Global Telecommunications (GLOBECOM), 2021.			WWW
Design Considerations for Low Power Internet Protocols. Hudson Ayers, Paul Crews, Hubert Teo, Conor McAvity, Amit Levy, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2020), 2020.			WWW	Paper
Challenge: Unlicensed LPWANs Are Not Yet the Path to Ubiquitous Connectivity. Branden Ghena, Joshua Adkins, Longfei Shangguan, Kyle Jamieson, Philip Levis, and Prabal Dutta. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '19), 2019.			WWW	Paper
Beetle: Flexible Communication for Bluetooth Low Energy. Amit Levy, James Hong, Laurynas Riliskis, Philip Levis, and Keith Winstein. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), 2016.		Slides	WWW	Paper
CTP: An Efficient, Robust, and Reliable Collection Tree Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, Maria Kazandjieva, David Moss, and Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), 2013.			WWW	Paper
Beyond Full Duplex Wireless. Kannan Srinivasan, Steven Hong, Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Jeff Mehlman, Sachin Katti, and Philip Levis. In Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2012.			WWW	Paper
RFC 6719 - The Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function. Omprakash Gnawali and Philip Levis. In Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Request for Comments: 6719, 2012.			WWW	Paper
Buffer Sizing in Wireless Mesh Networks. Kamran Jamshaid, Basem Shihada, Li Xia, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems p272-281, 2011.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Practical, Real-time, Full-Duplex Wireless. Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Taemin Kim, Dinesh Bharadia, Siddharth Seth, Kannan Srinivasan, Philip Levis, Sachin Katti and Prasun Sinha. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2011), 2011.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Single Channel Full-Duplex Wireless Radios. Mayank Jain. In Doctoral Dissertation, 2011.			WWW	Paper
RFC 6206: The Trickle Algorithm. Philip Levis and Thomas Clausen and Jonathan Hui and Omprakash Gnawali and JeongGil Ko. In Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Request for Comments: 6206, 2011.			WWW	Paper
Granting Silence to Avoid Wireless Collisions. Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain, Maria A. Kazandjieva, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
A Case for Evaluating Sensor Network Protocols Concurrently. Omprakash Gnawali, Leonidas Guibas, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH), 2010.			WWW	Paper
Achieving Single Channel, Full Duplex Wireless Communication. Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain, Kannan Srinivasan, Philip Levis and Sachin Katti. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2010), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The k-factor: Inferring Protocol Performance Using Inter-Link Reception Correlation. Kannan Srinivasan, Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Tahir Azim, Edward S Kim, Philip Levis and Bhaskar Krishnamachari. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2010), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Whirlpool Routing for Mobility. Jung Woo Lee, Branislav Kusy, Tahir Azim, Philip Levis, and Basem Shihada. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), 2010.			WWW	Paper
Physically-Based Models of Low-Power Wireless Links using Signal Power Simulation. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (COMNET), 2010.			WWW	Paper
An Empirical Study of Low Power Wireless. Kannan Srinivasan, Prabal Dutta, Arsalan Tavakoli, Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2010.			WWW	Paper
The Case for a Network Protocol Isolation Layer. Jung Il Choi, Maria Kazandjieva, Mayank Jain, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.			WWW	Paper
Collection Tree Protocol. Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, David Moss, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.	Data		WWW	Paper
Starburst SSD: An Efficient Protocol for Selective Dissemination. Tahir Azim, Philip Levis and Qasim Mansoor. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2009.			WWW	Paper
Burstiness and scaling in the structure of low-power wireless links. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The B-factor: Measuring Wireless Link Burstiness. Kannan Srinivasan, Maria Kazandjieva, Saatvik Agarwal, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Investigating a Physically-Based Signal Power Model for Robust Wireless Link Simulation. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM), 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The Emergence of a Networking Primitive in Wireless Sensor Networks. Philip Levis, Eric Brewer, David Culler, David Gay, Samuel Madden, Neil Patel, Joe Polastre, Scott Shenker, Robert Szewczyk, and Alec Woo. In Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 7, 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Data Discovery and Dissemination with DIP. Kaisen Lin and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2008.			WWW	Paper
Four-Bit Wireless Link Estimation. Rodrigo Fonseca, Omprakash Gnawali, Kyle Jamieson, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets VI), 2007.			WWW	Paper
Visibility: A New Metric for Protocol Design. Megan Wachs, Jung Il Choi, Jung Woo Lee, Kannan Srinivasan, Zhe Chen, Mayank Jain and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2007.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Improving Wireless Simulation Through Noise Modeling. HyungJune Lee, Alberto Cerpa, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2007.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Some Implications of Low-Power Wireless to IP Routing. Kannan Srinivasan, Prabal Dutta, Arsalan Tavakoli, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets V), 2006.		Slides	WWW	Paper
RSSI Is Under-Appreciated. Kannan Srinivasan and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNets), 2006.		Slides	WWW	Paper
A Unifying Link Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks. Joseph Polastre, Jonathan Hui, Philip Levis, Jerry Zhao, David Culler, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica. In Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2005.			WWW	Paper
Towards a Sensor Network Architecture: Lowering the Waistline. David Culler, Prabal Dutta, Cheng Tien Eee, Rodrigo Fonseca, Jonathan Hui, Philip Levis, Joseph Polastre, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Gilman Tolle, and Jerry Zhao. In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS X), 2005.			WWW	Paper
The Firecracker Protocol. Philip Levis and David Culler. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, 2004.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Trickle: A Self-Regulating Algorithm for Code Propagation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks. Philip Levis, Neil Patel, David Culler, and Scott Shenker. In Proceedings of the First USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2004.		Slides	WWW	Paper

Funding

This research has supported by generous gifts from DoCoMo Capital, the National Science Foundation under grants #0832820, #0831163, #0846014 and #0546630, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Microsoft Research, scholarships from the Samsung Scholarship Foundation, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship and a Stanford Terman Fellowship.

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