The Mobility, Networks, and Systems (MNS) group conducts research in networking and systems. Our work and interests span several areas, including Internet-scale systems, distributed systems, network protocols, wireless networking, mobile computing, and sensor systems. We seek to advance the state of the art in these areas through measurement, design, and prototyping of real-world and experimental networked systems. We share our work with the research community by publishing in the leading research conferences and journals, and releasing software prototypes. We also work with Microsoft's product groups to transfer research technology where appropriate. Finally, we engage with academia through research collaborations and service on journal editorial boards, conference committees, and student thesis committees.
We are hiring Research Assistants! Click here to know further details.
Primary contact: Venkat Padmanabhan, Principal Researcher & Research Manager
Current Projects
Our ongoing research spans the following areas:
- DirCast: Improving wireless multicast performance
- CocoNet: Wide-area network acceleration
- NetPrints: Home network configuration management and diagnosis
- Distributed sensing using mobile phones
Past Projects
- SixthSense: RFID-based sensing
- COMBINE: collaborative downloading for multi-homed mobile devices
- SPACE: Secure protocol for addressbook-based connection establishment
- Delivering location-sensitive information using Wi-Fi networks
- Sensor network based landslide prediction
- Framework for offline web browsing
Visiting Researchers
George Varghese (UC San Diego) [Jun-Jul 2009] Kameswari Chebrolu (IIT Mumbai) [May-Jul 2008]
Bhaskaran Raman (IIT Mumbai) [May-Jul 2008]
Geoff Voelker (UC San Diego) [Sep 2007─Feb 2008]
Alumni
Prashanth Mohan (assistant researcher [2007─2008] → Ph.D. student @ UC Berkeley)
Lenin Ravindranath (assistant researcher [2006─2008] → Ph.D. student @ MIT)
Ganesh Ananthanarayanan (assistant researcher [2005─2007] → Ph.D. student @ UC Berkeley)
Interns
2009 Pralav Dessai (BITS Goa Campus) Swati Gupta (IIT Delhi) Anand Padmanabha Iyer (UT Austin) Azeem Khan (IIT Mumbai) Vijay Kumar (BITS Goa Campus) Pradeep Padala (U Michigan Ann Arbor) Eric Rozner (UT Austin) Aaron Schulman (UMD College Park) Anirudh Sivaraman (IIT Chennai)
2008
Ashok Anand (Wisconsin)
Athula B. (IIT Chennai)
Siddharth Eswaran (IIT Delhi)
Zahir Koradia (IIT Mumbai)
Chitra Muthukrishnan (Anna University)
Krishna Puttaswamy (UC Santa Barbara)
Shravan Rayanchu (Wisconsin)
Joshua Reich (Columbia)
Ashish Sharma (UCSB)
Jay Taneja (Berkeley)
2007
Bhavish Aggarwal (IIT Mumbai)
Piyush Agrawal (IIT Kanpur)
Manveer Chawla (IIT Mumbai)
Nilesh Mishra (IIT Kanpur)
Ramya Bharathi Nimmagadda (BITS Pilani)
Sumit Rangwala (USC)
Abhishek Sharma (USC)
R. Srikrishna (BITS Pilani)
Pei Zhang (Princeton)
2005
Rohan Murthy (Cornell)
Anmol Sheth (Univ. of Colorado Boulder)
Collaborators
- Kameswari Chebrolu (IIT Mumbai)
- Anurag Kumar (IISc)
- Joy Kuri (IISc)
- Chandra Murthy (IISc)
- Bhaskaran Raman (IIT Mumbai)
- George Varghese (UC San Diego)
- Geoff Voelker (UC San Diego)
- Ashish Sharma, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Elizabeth Belding, Cool-Tether: Energy Efficient On-the-fly WiFi Hot-spots using Mobile Phones, in Proceedings of ACM CoNEXT, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., December 2009
- Ranveer Chandra, Sandeep Karanth, Thomas Moscibroda, Vishnu Navda, Jitu Padhye, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Lenin Ravindrananth, DirCast: A Practical and Efficient Wi-Fi Multicast System, in IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), IEEE, October 2009
- Ashok Anand, Chitra Muthukrishnan, Aditya Akella, and Ramachandran Ramjee, Redundancy in Network Traffic: Findings and Implications, in Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2009
- Bhavish Aggarwal, Ranjita Bhagwan, Tathagata Das, Siddharth Eswaran, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, NetPrints: Diagnosing Home Network Misconfigurations Using Shared Knowledge, in Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation , USENIX, April 2009
- Li Erran Li, Richard Alimi, Ramachandran Ramjee, Harish Viswanathan, and Yang Richard Yang, muNet: Harnessing Multiuser Capacity in Wireless Mesh Networks, in Proceedings of IEEE Infocom Mini Symposium, IEEE, April 2009
- Prashanth Mohan, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Ramachandran Ramjee, Nericell: Rich Monitoring of Road and Traffic Conditions using Mobile Smartphones, in ACM Sensys, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2008
- Venkat Padmanabhan, 10 Networking Papers: Elegance and Insight, in Invited paper in the Recommended Reading Series, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., July 2008
- Lenin Ravindranath, venkat padmanabhan, and piyush agrawal, SixthSense: RFID-based Enterprise Intelligence, in ACM Mobisys, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2008
- Abhishek Sharma, Ranjita Bhagwan, Monojit Choudhury, Leana Golubchik, Ramesh Govindan, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Automatic Request Characterization in Internet Services, in Proceedings of the 1st HotMetrics Workshop, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2008
Recent Talks
- NetPrints: Diagnosing Home Network Misconfigurations using Shared Knowledge - Stanford - March 2009 (Padmanabhan)
Professional Activities
Members of the MNS group are active in professional activities. Here's a sampling of recent and ongoing service on conference program committees and other activities:
- USENIX 2006 (Bhagwan)
- ACM MOBICOM 2006 (Ramjee, PC co-chair)
- ACM MOBISYS 2007 (Padmanabhan)
- ACM SIGCOMM 2007 (Padmanabhan)
- ACM MOBICOM 2007 (Ramjee)
- WISARD 2008 (Padmanabhan, Invited Talks Chair)
- COMSWARE 2008 (Padmanabhan, Ramjee)
- IEEE INFOCOM 2008 (Ramjee, Area Chair)
- WWW 2008 (Bhagwan)
- ACM SIGMETRICS 2008 (Padmanabhan)
- ACM MOBICOM 2008 (Ramjee)
- IEEE HotWeb 2008 (Padmanabhan, PC Chair)
- IEEE ICNP 2008 (Ramjee)
- ACM SenSys 2008 (Ramjee)
- COMSNETS 2009 (Bhagwan, Padmanabhan, Ramjee)
- IEEE Infocom 2009 (Bhagwan, Co-Chair Student Workshop; Ramjee)
- USENIX 2009 (Bhagwan)
- ACM SIGCOMM 2009 (Bhagwan)
- NSDI 2010 (Padmanabhan)
- ACM SIGCOMM 2010 (Padmanabhan, General Chair; Bhagwan, Publicity Chair; Ramjee, PC Member)
- USENIX 2010 (Bhagwan)
- INM 2010 (Bhagwan)
- Comsnets 2010 (Bhagwan, Ramjee)
Careers
Microsoft Research India offers a unique environment for research, offering researchers the freedom to pursue projects of interest to them, excellent support in terms of equipment, travel, etc., an open environment that strongly encourages publication, and rich opportunities for collaboration, including with researchers across MSR's worldwide network of labs. Researchers also have the opportunity to work with and mentor students during their internships at MSR India and beyond. The lab also offers researchers the unparalleled opportunity to impact millions of users worldwide by transferring research technology to or otherwise influencing Microsoft's product groups. Our positions are open to applicants from the world over, regardless of nationality.
The MNS group at MSR India recruits for a range of positions in the broad areas of networking and systems:
1. Researcher/Post-doc: We encourage recent or soon-to-be PhDs with a strong record of research and publication to apply. We also welcome applications from people who completed their PhD some time ago but have remained active in research and publication.
2. Assistant Researcher: This is a unique position targeted at fresh bachelors and masters students interested in research, giving them the opportunity to work with researchers at the lab on cutting-edge projects, write papers based on their work, participate in conferences, etc. This is a fixed-term position ─ typically of a 2-year duration ─ which prepares the assistant researchers to pursue a PhD, if they so wish (indeed, our assistant researchers have gone on to join the PhD programs at top universities such as Berkeley and MIT).
3. Intern: We have an active year-round internship program although the majority of our interns come during the summer. We invite applications from interested doctoral, masters, and bachelors students. Our interns' work over the past summers has lead to papers in top conferences, such as MobiSys, NSDI, and SIGMETRICS. If you are a student outside of India, this would be an opportunity to gain valuable international experience! Note: At the present time, we are actively evaluating applications for internships during summer 2009.
4. Visiting researcher: We have a limited number of openings for visiting researchers, who are typically faculty members who share our interests and who would enrich the group and the lab through mutually beneficial collaboration.
If you believe that your record and interests are a fit for the MNS group, we encourage you to apply. Please submit your application online here (be sure to select the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group). Feel free to also send email to Venkat Padmanabhan, especially if we have communicated about your application before. However, we do receive a large volume of email from applicants whose record and interests are clearly not a fit for the group, so please be considerate of our time when sending email.
