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The University of Illinois has a long history of success in the science of
computing, hosting some of the earliest computers such as ILLIAC
and the nation's first computer-assisted program of "intelligent''
instruction, PLATO. The early computers were very large,
occupying entire buildings, and computer scientists that built and used
them to develop some of the early breakthroughs in computer technologies
and applications literally worked inside the computer. In many aspects,
today's technology brings us back to "life inside a computer''. With
advances in wired and wireless networking, handheld and embedded computer
systems, and sensor and actuator technologies, our environment has been
equipped with a networked heterogeneous and dynamic array of sensors,
actuators, computing devices and controllers capable of acquiring a wide
array of different attributes. With the enormous amount of information
collected everywhere via these devices, one can better interact and make
sense of the environment and support a variety of applications. In some
sense, we live inside a huge, rapidly growing, intelligent cyber
physical system that is made possible via enabling technologies of
wired/wireless networking.
Apart from the complex network of interdependence that realizes the cyber
physical space, the networks themselves are also undergoing dramatic
changes in the underlying technologies and services provided, in order to
keep up with the surpassing growth of demands from new users and
applications. Furthermore, this evolution of information technology will
not stop and will continue with the development of advanced networking and
communications technologies playing a key role in the scalability,
robustness, accessibility, ubiquity, and utility of next generation
internets.
The goal of our research is to, on the one hand, understand how network
components and systems interact/coordinate with one another (via
theoretically grounded measurement, modeling, and simulation techniques)
in the cyber physical space and study how they perform under a wide
variety of circumstances, and on the other hand, to design/refine
new/existing network and systems techniques to optimize their interaction
subject to environmental effects and achieve globally (near-)optimal
performance that goes beyond what the current networks offer.
Our research is usually carried out as a combination of three synergistic components:
(i) derivation and reasoning of techniques, algorithms, and
their corresponding protocols in an analytical framework,
(ii) systems building and prototyping inside/outside the Linux kernel, and
(iii) their validation and evaluation via experimentation on lab testbeds, campus intranets, and the Internet.
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