Designing The Future Internet

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Rutgers’ Dipankar Raychaudhuri in the forefront of creating a mobile-friendly internet that can handle billions of devices and smart gadgets

The Internet of Things includes smart objects like fitness monitors, smart watches, smartphones and home thermostats.

Newswise, October 24, 2016 — This century, our world will be flooded with hundreds of billions of smartphones, gadgets, sensors and other smart objects connected to the internet.

 They will perform myriad services, such as monitoring our health, helping run households and boosting driver safety. At Rutgers, Dipankar “Ray” Raychaudhuri is at the forefront of efforts to redesign the internet to handle the enormous increase in traffic.

“The traffic that comes from mobile devices into the internet has been increasing exponentially. It used to be 10 percent five years ago – now it’s over 50 percent,” said Raychaudhuri, a distinguished professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineeringand director of the WINLAB (Wireless Information Network Lab).

“As a result, mobile wireless capacity is beginning to run out,” he said.

“That’s why cellular operators have to give you data limits. When you try to use a mobile phone and you’re downloading a web page, it stalls unexpectedly at times and you have to wait for the signal to improve. Also, there are all kinds of holes in the security system that need to be fixed.”

In 2010, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a Future Internet Architecture initiative and invited academics to take a fresh look at the internet. Raychaudhuri and colleagues proposed a“MobilityFirst” project aimed at reimagining the Internet, winning major NSF funding.

The MobilityFirst project, now in its sixth year, includes experts at Rutgers, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The NSF provided $3.275 million to Rutgers from 2010 to 2014 and $2.9 million since 2014, said Raychaudhuri, the project’s principal investigator.

“The internet has a lot of duct tape on it,” he said. “It works very well, but it has some limitations, especially when you try to do more mobile communications. How to re-architect the internet is a very ambitious goal.”

The MobilityFirst project is centered on shifting from the current internet protocol (IP) – an elegant, address-based routing technology designed in the 1970s – to name-based routing, he said.

An IP address is a unique number for an internet device, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which allocates the numbers used to route internet traffic to devices.

MobilityFirst’s name-based approach would be a fundamental change. Names would represent people, mobile phones, internet devices, small sensors or any other objects connected to the internet, said Raychaudhuri, a native of India who received his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

The benefits of MobilityFirst include more flexible services, better security, support for mobility across many technologies, efficiency and the ability to handle large volumes of traffic and data.

“We are not expecting to rip out the old internet,” Raychaudhuri said. “The internet has a lot of nice properties that we don’t want to lose.

“But one of the challenges for today’s internet is that with all these different modes of communication, some of them such as mobility services, broadcasting or content delivery are not handled very efficiently, and this could lead to flooding the network with too much data.”

The different modes of communication include the “Internet of Things” – a swiftly flowering field featuring smart objects, such as fitness monitors and smart watches, home thermostats and lighting, smartphones and devices with sensors.

Smart objects are expected to become pervasive in society, managing energy use in homes, monitoring food consumption, diagnosing health problems, monitoring cybersecurity and making driving safer, among other benefits.

Some 50 billion smart objects are anticipated by 2020, and 1 trillion sensors soon thereafter, according to the NSF.

“The Internet of Things has a lot of potential, but it needs fast and low delay networks that can ensure that data are received in time,” Raychaudhuri said.

“A lot of people are working on how to make cellular networks faster – so-called '5G' – and more functional, and many of the goals are similar to what we have in the MobilityFirst project.”

Three MobilityFirst trials are underway or planned, including one with SES, a satellite services company with a Princeton office. SES is using the MobilityFirst system to deliver content closer to its users, reducing the cost and improving user experience.

The second trial – with the University of Wisconsin-Madison – will show how an internet service provider’s circuits can be extended to offer mobile service.

The third trial, led by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in Texas, will look into how to do targeted emergency messaging in a disaster-recovery scenario, such as following a terrorism incident or a major hurricane like Katrina in 2005.

The Internet of Things also covers virtual reality and augmented reality, with people wearing special glasses that, for example, provide directions as they walk or show the stores in a shopping center, said Raychaudhuri, who joined Rutgers in 2001 after working at a startup company called Iospan Wireless in Silicon Valley, as well as the NEC USA C&C Research Laboratory and Sarnoff/ RCA Laboratories, both in Princeton, New Jersey.

A New Challenge for Caregivers: The Internet

As people age, how do they manage their online information?

Newswise, June 1, 2016. --- What should caregivers do when their loved one is checking in on social media at the bank, essentially announcing their whereabouts? What if they are posting too often or don’t remember making online purchases?

In the age of online living, caregivers lack support, resources and guidelines to help the vulnerable people who rely on them, according to an initial study, presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Human Computer Interaction (ACM-CHI) conference in San Jose, California.

The study is one of the first to examine the role of caregivers in the online lives of adults with cognitive impairments from Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions.

 In a world where many everyday activities have moved online, caregivers face a new challenge: finding a balance between autonomy and protection of care recipients.

“We want people to stay independent and engaged online, but current online systems make it difficult to help people in a way that empowers them without reducing their access,” said lead researcher Anne Marie Piper, assistant professor in the department of communication studies at Northwestern’s School of Communication.

“E-mail and social media sites aren’t designed to have a caregiver come alongside someone with cognitive impairments and help them stay active online.”

The researchers used focus groups consisting of 20 people informally caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s, dementia and other brain-related conditions.

They detailed four main ways caregivers currently help people with cognitive impairments use the Internet -- “guiding, stimulating, connecting, and protecting,” with guidelines about how to improve those dynamics.

Caregivers could set up family accounts to support home computer use among family members. They also should learn how to recognize when vulnerability may be transitional, such as a gradual recovery after a stroke or a progression from early to late stage dementia.

Finally, the researchers recommended implementing a system that would allow caregivers to detect risky online situations.

For example, if a password or credit card were disclosed, a transaction would be held for review by the primary caregiver. These ideas, however, raise new ethical questions about who has control over a person’s online life, Piper said.

“Technological caregiving is a new form of work,” Piper said. “We hear about the physical, financial and social stress of caregiving, but no one ever talks about the burden caregivers feel to keep people active online, which we feel is a fundamental part of participating in society.”

According to the study, caregivers support online activity in the following ways:

Guiding: Caregivers may help someone type words into a search engine or operate a mouse. Even previously tech-savvy care recipients may need to re-learn how to use a specific technology.

“What’s challenging is that cognitive impairment is dynamic, and an individual’s needs may shift day-to-day or even moment-to-moment,” Piper said.

Stimulating: Social media can be a form of entertainment or stimulation. Caregivers play “brain games,” read news sites or view online photos of family members. “This interaction can help alleviate some of the burden of caregiving and provide a mutual source of enjoyment,” the researchers found. It also means caregivers have to spend time searching for content, identifying meaningful photos or videos and working it into a conversation.

Connecting: Facebook is a particularly important site for social support, caregivers said. In the study, they mentioned posting weekly updates on Facebook, Instagram, Blogger.com and Caregiver.com.

The ways caregivers post online information “introduces tensions around surrogacy, privacy and information sharing for vulnerable populations,” the researchers wrote.

Protecting: Caregivers use spam filters and set restrictive privacy settings to help avoid phishing and to block harmful websites, friend requests or potentially upsetting information.

They vigilantly watch for online financial threats. “The challenge is deciding when and under what circumstances a care recipient should not have access to credit card information required for online purchases,” the researchers wrote. “Sometimes it’s not until an adverse event like identity theft or overspending that the caregiver realizes they need to protect their care recipient online.”