Open Infrastructure
A Wireless Network Research Framework
for Residential Networks

Open Infrastructure is a wireless network research framework developed by a team of researchers at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. The goal of the framework is to allow researchers to study wireless networks, and develop new technology under a uniform environment. In particular, it aims at leveraging residential brandband networks and routers to enable ubiquitous wireless access, and data storage in an efficient, reliable, low power, and low cost. It consists of customized wireless router firmware, a suite of management tools, and optional hardware extension devices.

This project page describes the components of the platform and the projects developed using it.

Projects

Our group is currently carrying on the following projects on the Open Infrastructure platform.

  • BaPu - Efficient and Practical Bunching of Access Point Uplinks

    BaPu is a complete software based solution on WiFi Access Point for aggregating multiple broadband uplinks, with the assistance of the WiFi infrastructure in the same neighborhood. Our solution features complete transparency to client devices and high aggregated throughput for both TCP and UDP, even in lossy wireless environment. Our extensive experiments shows that de- spite TCP's sensitivity to typical channel factors such as high wireless packet loss, out-of-order packets arrivals due to multipath, heterogeneous backhaul capacity, and dynamic delays, BaPu achieves a backhaul aggregation up to 95% of the theoretical maximum throughput for UDP and 88% for TCP. We also empirically estimate the potential idle bandwidth that can be harnessed from residential broadband.

    [more]

  • WiZi-Cloud - A Dual WiFi-ZigBee Radio Solution for Low Power Internet Access on Mobile Devices

    WiZi-Cloud is an open-source dual-radio solution for scalibility and energy efficiency of mobile phones' Internet access. It consists of a set protocols, and hardware/software components integrating WiFi and ZigBee radios on mobile phones and access points. WiZi-Cloud aims at providing: ubiquitous connectivity, high energy efficiency, real time intra-device/inter-AP handover, that is transparent to the applications.

    [more]

  • SNEAP - Social Network Enabled EAP Authentication Method for WiFi Hotspots

    SNEAP (A Social Network-Enabled EAP Method), is an WiFi WPA2 authentication method which relies on well established social network authentication frameworks, e.g. Facebook API. Imagine that WiFi hot spots from AT&T, Boingo, T-Mobile, etc., all are turned WPA2 secured, and you can just go ahead to connect to them with your Facebook accounts.

    [more]

  • Residential Broadband Study

    We are deploying wireless routers, customized with our OpenWiFi firmwares, in residential broadband networks to form a testbed for residential network study. Such testbed allows researchers to carrry out a variety of experiments to profile the residential broadband network usage, learn the end users' Internet usage behavior, and to try out new research ideas in the real residential networks.

    Currently, our testbed is running mainly in the Boston urban area, spanning across 3 major ISP's.

    [more]

    • Team
  • Faculty: Guevara Noubir
  • Ph.D. Students: Tao Jin, Aldo Cassola, Arash Molavi
  • Master Students: Deep Singh
  • Alumni(past contributors): Don Straney, Harsh Kumar, Kamal Sharma, Bo Sheng