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.
Primary contact: Venkat Padmanabhan, Principal Researcher & Research Manager
News
- Krishna Chintalapudi and Vishnu Navda give invited talks at COMSNETS 2011
- Ranjita Bhagwan gives invited talk at NIIT University
- SpecNet and Privad papers accepted at NSDI 2011
- Venkat Padmanabhan gives Keynote Talks at Middleware 2010 and IMSAA 2010
- Advertising measurement paper accepted at IMC 2010; wide coverage in the popular press (NYTimes, CNN, Slashdot, ...)
- Ram Ramjee gives invited talk at IEEE Tech Fridays at IISc
- Ram Ramjee selected as a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM
- Ram Ramjee wins the 2010 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award for invention made while he was at Bell Labs
- LiteGreen paper wins best paper award at USENIX ATC 2010
- Bartendr and EZ papers accepted at ACM MOBICOM 2010
- Baaz paper accepted at USENIX Security 2010
- Assistant Researcher, Tathagata Das, admitted to the PhD programs at Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Stanford, and other schools.
- NAPman and PRISM papers accepted at ACM MobiSys 2010
- EndRE paper accepted at USENIX NSDI 2010
- WLAN energy modelling paper wins best paper award at COMSNETS 2010
- Venkat Padmanabhan selected as a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM
Events
- ACM Sigcomm 2010 [Aug 30 - Sept 3, 2010]
- MSRI Wireless Networking retreat - Connecting the Next Billion [Aug 28 - 29, 2010]
- First Mysore Park Workshop on Building and Programming The Cloud [Jan 13 - 16, 2010]
- MSRI Networking Summer School [June 8 - 19, 2009]
Current Projects
Our ongoing research spans the following areas (partial list):
Past Projects
- NAPman: Network-assisted power management for WiFi devices
- DirCast: Improving wireless multicast performance
- NetPrints: Home network configuration management and diagnosis
- 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
Anand Padmanabha Iyer (research assistant [2010─2011] → Ph.D. student @ UC Berkeley)
Mudit Jain (research assistant [2010─2011] → Engineer @ Microsoft)
Bhavish Aggarwal (assistant researcher [2008─2010] → Founder of a start-up)
Tathagata Das (assistant researcher [2008─2010] → Ph.D. student @ UC Berkeley)
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)
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)
- bhavish aggarwal, ranjita bhagwan, lorenzo de carli, venkata n padmanabhan, and krishna puttaswamy, Deja vu: Fingerprinting Network Problems, in The 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT 2011), ACM SIGCOMM, December 2011
- Eugenio Magsiretti, krishna kant chintalapudi, Bozidar Radunovic, and Ramachandran Ramjee, WiFi-Nano : Reclaiming WiFi Efficiency through 800 ns slots, in Mobicom, September 2011
- Anand Iyer, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Chandra Murthy, SpecNet: Spectrum Sensing Sans Frontières, in 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), USENIX, March 2011
- Saikat Guha, Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis, Privad: Practical Privacy in Online Advertising, in Proceedings of 8th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Boston, MA, March 2011
- Saikat Guha, Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis, Challenges in Measuring Online Advertising Systems, in Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Melbourne, Australia, November 2010
- Aaron Schulman, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Neil Spring, Pralhad Deshpande, Calvin Grunewald, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, and Kamal Jain, Bartendr: A Practical Approach to Energy-aware Cellular Data Scheduling, in Mobicom, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 20 September 2010
- Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Anand Padmanabha Iyer, and Venkat Padmanabhan, Indoor Localization Without the Pain, in Mobicom, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 2010
- Tathagata Das, Ranjita Bhagwan, and Prasad Naldurg, Baaz: A System for Detecting Access Control Misconfigurations, in USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX, August 2010
- Tathagata Das, Pradeep Padala, Venkat Padmanabhan, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Kang G. Shin, LiteGreen: Saving Energy in Networked Desktops Using Virtualization, in USENIX Annual Technical Conference [BEST PAPER], USENIX, 23 June 2010
- Tathagata Das, Prashant Mohan, Venkat Padmanabhan, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Asankhaya Sharma, PRISM: Platform for Remote Sensing using Mobile Smartphones, in International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (Mobisys), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 15 June 2010
- Eric Rozner, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Shravan Rayanchu, NAPman: Network-Assisted Power Management for WiFi Devices, in MobiSys, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 15 June 2010
- Krishna Chintalapudi, I-MAC - a MAC that learns, in International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2010
- Bhavish Aggarwal, Aditya Akella, Ashok Anand, Athula Balachandran, Pushkar Chitnis, Chitra Muthukrishnan, Ramachandran Ramjee, and George Varghese, EndRE: An End-System Redundancy Elimination Service for Enterprises, in Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), USENIX, April 2010
- krishna puttaswamy, ranjita bhagwan, and venkat padmanabhan, Anonygator: Privacy and Integrity Preserving Data Aggregation, in ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th International Middleware Conference, 2010
- P. Agrawal, A. Kumar, J. Kuri, M. K. Panda, V. Navda, R. Ramjee, and V. Padmanabhan, Analytical Models for Energy Consumption in Infrastructure WLAN STAs Carrying TCP Traffic, in International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), Best Paper Award, IEEE, January 2010
- 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 International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (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 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
- Anand Prabhu Subramanian, Vishnu Navda, P. Deshpande, and Sameer R. Das, A Measurement Study of Inter-Vehicular Communication Using Steerable Beam Directional Antenna, in ACM VANET Workshop, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 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:
- 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)
- ACM SIGMETRICS 2011 (Ramjee)
- ACM MobiSys 2011 (Padmanabhan)
- ACM SIGCOMM 2011 (Padmanabhan)
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. Research Assistant: 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 research assistants have gone on to join the PhD programs at top universities such as Berkeley and MIT). For more information, go to research assistant applications.
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! For more information, go to internships.
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 mnsrec@microsoft.com, 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.
