ABOUT
Tommaso Melodia is the William Lincoln Smith Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things and the Director of Research for the PAWR Project Office. He received his Laurea (integrated BS and MS) from the University of Rome – La Sapienza and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. He is an IEEE Fellow and recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award. He was named a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow in 2017 and received the Søren Buus Outstanding Research Award in 2018 – the highest research award in the College of Engineering at Northeastern University. Prof. Melodia is serving as Editor in Chief for Computer Networks, and has served as Associate Editor fo IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, among others. He was the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE Infocom 2018, and General Chair for ACM MobiHoc 2021, IEEE SECON 2019, ACM Nanocom 2019, and ACM WUWNet 2014. Prof. Melodia is the Director of Research for the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) Project Office, a $100M public-private partnership to establish 4 city-scale platforms for wireless research to advance the US wireless ecosystem in years to come. Prof. Melodia’s research on modeling, optimization, and experimental evaluation of Internet-of-Things and wireless networked systems has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, several industrial partners, the Air Force Research Laboratory the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, and the Army Research Laboratory. Prof. Melodia is the founder of Bionet Sonar, a spinoff commercializing Internet of Things systems in extreme environments.
Scientific Session: Toward Fully Programmable Wireless Networks for 5G and Beyond
Abstract: This talk will present an overview of our work on laying the basic design principles for radically new approaches to software-defined networking (SDN) and programmability for next-generation wireless networks.
First, we will introduce the building principles of a Wireless Network Operating System (WNOS). Departing from classical SDN approaches, WNOS provides the network designer with abstractions hiding (i) the lower-level details of the wireless protocol stack and (ii) the distributed nature of the network operations. Based on this abstract representation, the WNOS takes network control programs written on a centralized, high-level view of the network and automatically generates distributed cross-layer control programs based on distributed optimization theory that are executed by each individual node on an abstract representation of the radio node. We will illustrate several prototype implementations of WNOS on software-defined radio devices and test its effectiveness in controlling cellular 5G networks, networks of drones, and illustrate how the global network behavior can be controlled by modifying a few lines of code on a centralized abstraction.