Stanford Networked Systems Group

Users expect to have wireless connectivity anytime, anywhere. Further, our applications and data are moving to the cloud, and users increasingly expect to access cloud-based, rich and interactive applications such as high definition video, virtual cloud-hosted desktop applications, mobile gaming, and more over wireless networks. Yet, user experience on mobile wireless networks is poor. Carriers blame this on the two trends: exponentially growing traffic demand and a shortage of spectrum.

Paradoxically however, we are surrounded by a sea of dense and chaotic wireless connectivity. When we walk around a city, we see tens of cellular basestations and hundreds of WiFi access points. The future will look even more dense, with carriers increasingly deploying pico and femtocells. A natural question is: why can’t my ISP stitch together the connectivity we need for the cloud applications we want to use from this dense wireless infrastructure? Connect us to the best access point possible, or even multiple of them if we want more speed, or prioritize our application traffic appropriately so that specific flows (video, latency sensitive applications etc) get the connectivity they need.

OpenRadio uses a software defined networking approach to design future wireless networks and deliver on the above vision. Our main design principle is to decouple service definition from the hardware network substrate. In other words, OpenRadio provides a unified software interface to monitor and program heterogeneous wireless networks ranging from cellular to WiFi to whitespace. The interface provides the capability to identify traffic subsets, and specify how that particular traffic should be routed, what speeds it should be allocated in the backhaul network, how it should be schedule over the air, what priority should be assigned and so on. Armed with such programmatic control, service provides can program the wireless infrastructure to provide users and applications the connectivity they need from whatever wireless access points are around. Further, such an interface allows the network to evolve towards a platform for applications rather than a simple bitpipe.

Publications

Talks

Sachin talks about OpenRadio at Open Networking Summit ’12, Stanford (17 minutes)

Manu talks about OpenRadio at HotSDN, SIGCOMM ’12, Helsinki (12 minutes)

People

Manu Bansal (PhD Candidate)
Sachin Katti (Faculty)

Collaborators

Nick Mckeown (Faculty)
Phil Levis (Faculty)
Yan Michalevsky (PhD Candidate)
Kanthi Nagaraj (PhD Candidate)
KK Yap (PhD Candidate, coadvised with Nick Mckeown)
Yiannis Yiakoumis (PhD Candidate, coadvised with Nick Mckeown)

Past

Jeffrey Mehlman (PhD Candidate)
Vighnesh Rege (MS student)
Zane Silver (Undergraduate)
John Inacay (Undergraduate)
Michael Duarte (Undergraduate)
Jerry Zhou (Undergraduate)

Support