Seminar - Professor Rong Zheng

Thursday, July 4, 2013 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Speaker

Professor Rong Zheng

Mc Master University

Title

Sequential learning in wireless monitoring

Abstract

Passive monitoring is a technique where a dedicated set of hardware devices, called sniffers, are used to monitor activities in wireless networks. These devices capture transmissions of wireless devices or activities of interference sources in their vicinity, and store packet  
level or PHY layer information in trace files, which can be analyzed distributively or at a central location. Since most, if not all,  infrastructure networks utilize multiple contiguous or non-contiguous  channels or bands, an important issue is to determine which set of  frequency bands each sniffer operates on to maximize the total amount of  information gathered. In this talk, we consider the problem of optimally assigning p sniffers to K channels to monitor the transmission activities in a multi-channel wireless network. The activity of users is initially unknown to the sniffers and is to be learned along with channel assignment decisions. We devise efficient sequential learning approaches and address practical constraints including channel switching time, computation costs and non-stationary network conditions.

Speaker Biography

Rong Zheng received her Ph.D. degree from Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her M.E. and B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, P.R. China. She is presently an associate professor in the Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University. She was with the University of Houston from 2004 to 2012.

Rong Zheng's research interests include network monitoring and diagnosis, cyber physical systems, and mobile computing. She is the recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006, and University of Houston research excellence award in 2010. She served on the technical program committees of several leading networking conferences, and was the program co-chair of WASA'12 and CPSCom'12.