Projects

 
The Laboratory for Advanced System Software (LASS) was established in the Fall of 1998 by Prashant Shenoy to investigate issues in operating system and networking support for distributed multimedia applications. The laboratory conducts research in the areas of file systems, operating systems, computer networks, and large-scale distributed systems, all with an emphasis on multimedia.

Projects are underway in these categories: OS, Storage & Virtualization - Sensor Networks - Pervasive Multimedia - RFID

A list of Past Projects is also available.
 

OS, Storage, & Virtualization

 

VirtX

This project seeks to find innovative uses of virtualization technology to improve performance and reliability on desktops and server clusters. We are currently investigating these issues:
  • How can administrators more effectively deploy and consolidate virtual machines in data centers?
  • How can we leverage VMs to dynamically provision resources in a data center?
  • Can virtualization be used to provide high availability and fault tolerance at low cost?
  • How can virtualization be taken advantage of in desktop environments?
 

Sensor Networks

 

Presto

A unifying constraint across the spectrum of sensor data management applications is that the remote sensor nodes at the network edge are usually constrained in power, functionality and/or bandwidth, and communicate using multi-hop routing to a resource-rich proxy that connects the sensors to the Internet. PRESTO takes a fresh look at the design of tiered large-scale sensor networks that comprise tethered and untethered elements and addresses three key questions:
  • Where should sensor data be archived?
  • How can low-latency, interactive query processing be supported in-spite of the power and bandwidth constraints of sensors, frequent sensor failures and vagaries of wireless links?
  • How can a user access data generated at numerous sensors, and across a large geographic domain in an efficient manner?

SensEye

Recent technology trends have resulted in a broad spectrum of camera sensors, wireless radio technologies, and embedded sensor platforms. SensEye is designed on the principle that multi-tier networks are not only scalable, they offer a number of advantages over simpler, single-tier unimodal networks: lower cost, better coverage, higher functionality, and better reliability.

STONES

The STOrage for Networked Embedded Sensors project is aimed at developing an ultra-low power storage sub-system for sensor devices. As part of the first phase, the ESSense sub-project performed a measurement study of storage devices relevant to the sensor domain in order to find the most energy-efficient device. In the second part of the STONES project, we are looking at developing a sensor-specific storage system.
 

Pervasive Multimedia Systems

 
 

SEVA & FERRET

These projects combine the emergence of RFID and GPS with the increasing multimedia recording capabilities of low power devices to build innovative pervasive multimedia systems.
  • SEVA is a sensor driven digital recording and anotation system.
  • Ferret is a scalable, realtime system for localizing nomadic objects using RFID tags.
 

RFID Data Management

 
 

RFID Projects

Our research focus is on data management issues in RFID networks that are deployed in enterprise supply chains and healthcare environments. A full project description will be added shortly.