(This talk will be part of the course lecture of CS/ECE 707 which will be held in the CS 1240 room. Everyone is invited to attend.)

This talk will give an introduction to the Resilient Networks project with a focus on our efforts in measuring and improving mobile broadband performance. Mobile broadband is rapidly becoming a critical service that many users are relying on every day. Several events in Norway and other countries over the last years have shown that failures in these networks have severe consequences. These large-scale failures are, however, not the only source of frustration for users. Our measurements show that most mobile broadband connections also experience frequent short-lived periods of lost connectivity.

There is a need for more systematic information about the reliability and stability of mobile broadband services as experienced by the end user. This information is critical for businesses, organizations and emergency services who rely on these networks for performing their core tasks, and for operators, regulators and consumers who are interested in the overall performance of mobile networks. In this talk, I will describe finished and on-going efforts in the Resilient Networks project to measure the robustness of mobile broadband services in Norway. Our first efforts in this area focused on measuring the reliability of mobile broadband connections from a set of voting locations spread across Norway. I will go through some of our findings, and comment on our experiences with performing this type of measurements. I will then talk about our ongoing efforts in establishing a more permanent infrastructure for monitoring the quality and robustness of Norwegian mobile broadband networks.

Bio:
Amund Kvalbein is a Senior Research Scientist at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Oslo (2007). After finishing his PhD, he spent one year as a post doc at Georgia Institute of Technology, before returning to Oslo and Simula. He is currently leader of the Resilient Networks project, focusing on methods for improving the user-experienced stability and reliability of fixed and cellular communication networks. His main research interest is in the robustness and performance of networks and networked services, with a particular focus on recovery and scalability at the routing layer.