As mobile devices with dual WiFi and cellular interfaces become widespread, network protocols have been developed that utilize the availability of multiple paths. To evaluate the performance of these protocols on a testbed, researchers often use link emulation with either synthetic traces or real traces from live WiFi and cellular networks. However, in a multipath scenario, the two links are not necessarily independent. The available bandwidth on the WiFi and cellular links may be negatively correlated (e.g. when moving from indoors to outdoors or vice versa) or positively correlated (e.g. when the local density of other users increases, so that both networks become more congested at the same time), and the result of an experimental evaluation of a multipath protocol will depend heavily on this relationship. Link traces of WiFi and cellular links measured at the same time, in the same place are necessary for the reproducible evaluation of multi path protocols in a testbed environment. The contributions of this work, therefore are: first ever data set of wireless link traces measured simultaneously on WiFi and cellular interfaces of a mobile device, and reference experiments for replaying these traces on emulated links on the CloudLab and FABRIC testbeds.

Initiatives addressing issues of Women in Computing (WiC) at FSC has been inconsistent in the last decade. As a response, two faculty have worked with student leaders to reinstantiate the WiC student club during the COVID19 pandemic. Re-instituting the club has raised some questions that are not entirely pandemic related. FSC is primarily a commuter college within the larger NY State university system, where 90% of the 10,000 enrolled commute. Computer Systems enrollment is consistently 90% male and 10% female. Since student clubs are vital for the social climate and student engagement of a college campus, women-focused student clubs are especially important to create a supportive atmosphere and camaraderie among the women students enrolled in the computing programs. In this BoF, the facilitators look forward to collaborating with colleagues/student leaders who have experience and interest in advising/running student clubs. The facilitators would also like to explore more deeply on topics of working with student leaders, examining the role of faculty advisors for student clubs, and welcome insight and perspectives of students who are involved with student clubs. The facilitators will share and solicit input on the unique challenges of commuter colleges where there is a shortage of student leaders that have the time and the mindset for running student clubs.

Gender disparity in student enrollment is consistent with many other national and global computer degree programs, however, as student enrollment at Farmingdale State College (FSC) computing degrees has doubled, the percentage of women remained hovering at 8--15% over the last decade. Recently, initiatives have been underway to address the gender imbalance that exists at FSC computing degree programs. With a limited budget, and some local funding, multiple initiatives to reduce the gender disparity have been taken recently. This paper describes the details of the initiatives in progress and presents early survey results to report a measure on how students identifying as women are responding to these activities. In addition, early survey results provide promising preliminary read on the experience of women while pursuing their computing degrees and indicate how to focus the future initiatives.

Farmingdale State College (FSC) is an undergraduate institution within the State University of NY (SUNY) system located in Long Island, serving about 10,000 students where 94% are commuters, 57% are awarded financial aid, 45% are from minority populations, and 43% are women. The Computer Programming and Information Systems (CPIS) program enrollment has doubled in the past ten years reaching about 550 students but the percentage of women in the program has remained flat at 10% during the same period. This paper details the journey of initiatives to engage and retain women in the CPIS program in the past decade, analyzes the high and low periods of such activities, and examines why the high periods were not sustained.

Congestion is a challenging problem in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) because of resource constraints, and dynamic routing. Congestion control is a big concern in achieving fairness between optimal network resource utilization and end-to-end flow control. In MANETs, with shared resources, when multiple senders contend for the same link bandwidth, data rate by each sender must be adjusted to avoid network overload which causes Quality of Service compromises. Strict ordering of data transmission in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) causes poorer performance during data transmission in MANETs. Unlike TCP, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has a built-in multi-streaming feature to alleviate this issue caused by strict data ordering when using a single data stream within a transport connection. In this paper, we propose a Congestion Avoidance Mechanism over MANET routing based on Data Priority and Streaming Delay Weights (SDWs) which also utilizes SCTP multi-streaming (namely CAM-SCTP). Our proposal implements a Priority Manager (PM) to effectively select a stream to transmit data based on the data priority and by dynamically computing an SDW value per node. Experimental evaluation of the CAM-SCTP is performed for three different data types. The results show improvement in throughput for all data types while maintaining lower jitter, loss, and overhead.

The emerging use of multi-homed wireless devices along with simultaneous multi-path data transfer offers tremendous potentials to improve the capacity of multi-hop wireless networks. The use of simultaneous data transfer over separate disjoint paths in multi-hop wireless networks to increase network capacity is a less explored subject, mainly because of the challenges it triggers for the reliable transport layer protocols. Reliable transport layer protocols generally use packet sequence number as a mean to ensure delivery. As such, the out-of-order packet arrival in reliable transport layer protocols triggers receiver buffer blocking that causes throughput degradation and prevents the reliable multi-path transport layer protocol to realize its vast potential. This paper focuses on integrating network coding with a reliable multi-path transport layer protocol to resolve the receiver buffer blocking problem. We propose an adaptive network coding mechanism to desensitize the receiver against packet reordering and consequently eliminate the receiver buffer blocking problem. Our state-of-the-art network coding scheme uses a combination of Q-learning and logistic regression for rare data events to control the number of redundant packets based on the network dynamics. We confirmed the veracity of our proposed scheme by a queuing theory based mathematical model. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through simulations and testbed experiments.

Multi-homed wireless devices equipped with multiple network interfaces that support the Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) of data are an inevitable part of future wireless networks. The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a multi-homed transport layer protocol that can support CMT. However, the receiver buffer blocking issue causes throughput degradation and prevents CMT from realizing its vast potential over multi-hop wireless networks. This paper is focused on integrating network coding with SCTP-based CMT to resolve the receiver buffer blocking problem. We propose an adaptive network coding mechanism for SCTP-CMT to desensitize the receiver against packet reordering and consequently eliminate the receiver buffer blocking problem. Our state-of-the-art network coding scheme uses a Q-learning algorithm to control the number of redundant packets based on the network dynamics. The effectiveness and soundness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through simulations and proved to outperform original SCTP-CMT up to a factor of 62% in the presence of severe path dissimilarities and limited receiver buffer. Our proposed scheme is one step forward towards future multi-homed devices over multi-hop wireless networks.

In prior work, a CMT protocol using SCTP multihoming (termed SCTP-based CMT) was proposed and investigated for improving application throughput. SCTP-based CMT was studied in (bottleneck-independent) wired networking scenarios with ns-2 simulations. This paper studies the TCP-friendliness of CMT in the Internet. In this paper, we surveyed historical developments of the TCP-friendliness concept and argued that the original TCP-friendliness doctrine should be extended to incorporate multihoming and SCTP-based CMT. Since CMT is based on (single-homed) SCTP, we first investigated TCP-friendliness of single-homed SCTP. We discovered that although SCTP’s congestion control mechanisms were intended to be “similar” to TCP’s, being a newer protocol, SCTP specification has some of the proposed TCP enhancements already incorporated which results in SCTP performing better than TCP. Therefore, SCTP obtains larger share of the bandwidth when competing with a TCP flavor that does not have similar enhancements. We concluded that SCTP is TCP-friendly, but achieves higher throughput than TCP, due to SCTP’s better loss recovery mechanisms just as TCP-SACK and TCP-Reno perform better than TCP-Tahoe. We then investigated the TCP-friendliness of CMT. Via QualNet simulations, we found out that one two-homed CMT association has similar or worse performance (for smaller number of competing TCP flows) than the aggregated performance of two independent, single-homed SCTP associations while sharing the link with other TCP connections, for the reason that a CMT flow creates a burstier data traffic than independent SCTP flows. When compared to the aggregated performance of two-independent TCP connections, one two-homed CMT obtains a higher share of the tight link bandwidth because of better loss recovery mechanisms in CMT. In addition, sharing of ACK information makes CMT more resilient to losses. Although CMT obtains higher throughput than two independent TCP flows, CMT’s AIMD-based congestion control mechanism allows other TCP flows to co-exist in the network. Therefore, we concluded that CMT is TCP-friendly, similar to two TCP-Reno flows are TCP-friendly when compared to two TCP-Tahoe flows.

A multihome-capable transport layer protocol allows an application to transmit data via multiple (disjoint) paths simultaneously, a scheme termed concurrent multipath transfer (CMT). SCTP is an IETF-standardized transport layer protocol with built-in multihoming capability. In prior work, a CMT protocol using SCTP multihoming (termed SCTP-based CMT) was proposed and investigated for improving application throughput in wired networks. In that effort, SCTP-based CMT was studied in (bottleneck-independent) wired networking scenarios with ns-2 simulations. This dissertation studies SCTP-based CMT in two specific contexts using QualNet simulations: (i) CMT over Multihop Wireless Networks (MWNs), and (ii) TCP-friendliness of CMT in the Internet. CMT over MWNs: Given the recent advances in multiple-radio nodes, multichannel radios, and multi-path routing, more multihomed nodes are deployed in the wireless networks. This trend motivated us to study two specific issues in the context of CMT over MWNs. The first issue concerns the performance of CMT over MWNs, where we studied how the contention-induced losses and the wireless channel characteristics impact the performance of CMT. We found that similar to the wired cases, CMT over MWNs showed better performance than one single-homed SCTP association and even the ideal AppStripe application, when the receiver buffer (rBuf) was unconstrained. For the cases of constrained rBuf, we showed that considering the bandwidth limitations of multihop wireless networks compared to their wired counterparts, rBuf sizes bigger than 128 KB can be sufficiently enough not to restrain the CMT performance. Overall, we concluded that applications will benefit from using CMT in the MWNs context when they have sufficiently large rBuf. The second issue concerns the acknowledgment (ACK) mechanism of CMT, where we investigated different design choices for the ACK mechanism of CMT in MWN to mitigate the effects of contention-induced losses in the multihop wireless channels among data and ACK traffic. According to the ACK policy of the original CMT, an ACK packet is sent to the path where the latest DATA packet arrives from. Therefore, a CMT receiver may send ACKs packets to any one of the (return) paths. In this dissertation, we surveyed historical developments of the TCP-friendliness concept and argued that the original TCP-friendliness doctrine should be extended to incorporate multihoming and SCTP-based CMT. Since CMT is based on (single-homed) SCTP, as a first step, we investigated TCP-friendliness of single-homed SCTP. We discovered that although SCTP’s congestion control mechanisms were intended to be “similar” to TCP’s, being a newer protocol, SCTP specification has some of the proposed TCP enhancements already incorporated which results in SCTP performing better than TCP. Therefore, SCTP can obtain larger share of the bandwidth when competing with a TCP flavor that does not have similar enhancements. We concluded that SCTP is TCP-friendly but achieves higher throughput than TCP, due to SCTP’s better loss recovery mechanisms just as TCPSACK or TCP-Reno performs better than TCP-Tahoe. Then, we designed an experimental framework to investigate the TCP-friendliness of CMT according to the traditional doctrine of TCP-friendliness. Via QualNet simulations, we measured the sending rate of one two-homed CMT flow (containing two CMT subflows) and two SCTP flows and the impact of CMT and two SCTP flows on the other TCP flows in the network while sharing a tight link. We found out that one two-homed CMT association has similar or worse performance (for smaller number of competing TCP flows) than the aggregated performance of two independent, single-homed SCTP associations while sharing the link with other TCP connections, for the reason that a CMT flow creates a burstier data traffic than independent SCTP flows. When compared to the aggregated performance of two-independentTCP connections, one two-homed CMT obtains higher share of the tight link bandwidth because of better loss recovery mechanisms in CMT (as CMT inherits all the built-in TCP enhancements in SCTP). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

A transport layer protocol supporting multihoming allows an application to transmit data via multiple paths simultaneously (termed concurrent multipath transfer, or CMT for short). SCTP is an IETF-supported transport layer protocol with built-in multihoming capability. Earlier work by Iyengar et. al.proposed a CMT protocol using SCTP multihoming for improving application throughput, which studied the performance of CMT over wired networks using ns-2 simulations. Given recent advances in multiple radio nodes, multichannel radios, and multipath routing we believe that we will see more multihomednodes in the wireless networks context. This motivates us to study theSCTP-based CMT over wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the throughput of the applications using the SCTP-based CMT over IEEE 802.11 static multihop wireless networks with QualNet simulations.

We propose a quorum-based approach to facilitating match-making (content-based routing) service for wireless mesh networks. Given a wireless mesh network, mesh nodes first autonomously select a set of backbone nodes via a backbone selection protocol. These backbone nodes then participate in a symmetric coterie construction process to create a quorum system. A quorum system has the property that the interaction of every two quorums is not empty and the union of all quorums results in the set of all backbone nodes. By using these two properties, the approach facilitates a match-making service that matches producer nodes' advertisements and consumer nodes' subscriptions at intersecting nodes between quorums.

Support for Internet host mobility is increasingly important with the proliferation of wireless and mobile communication devices. Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a plausible choice in the Internet with its unique features like multi-homing and Dynamic Address Reconfiguration extension. We have proposed Cellular SCTP (cSCTP), which is an SCTP-based transport layer mobility solution that aims better handoff performance. In this paper, our focus is the handoff management functionality of cSCTP. We propose an approach to implementing duplicated data transfers during the handoffs to improve the performance. We also present preliminary simulation results using the QualNet network simulator.

In this paper, we describe a transport layer mobility scheme termed Cellular SCTP, or cSCTP for short, based on the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), for seamless soft handoff. We compare mobile IPv6 and two of its variants (mobile IPv6 with fast-handover and hierarchical mobile IPv6) with cSCTP on various aspects (especially the handoff process of micro-mobility). We also analyze the mobile IPv6 handover mechanism in detail to reveal the operations that constitutes extra delays or packet losses caused by handoffs. Furthermore, we describe the interworking of cSCTP with SIP for mobility management.

In a match-making system, sources (producers) advertise generated data without any particular destination in mind. Destinations (consumers) are determined based on their interests (via subscriptions) in receiving the produced data. Advertisements and subscriptions are matched by the underlying network service, so that routing is based on the content of messages. We propose to facilitate a match-making capability in ad hoc and sensor networks by adapting the idea of a quorum system. A quorum system is formed by organizing nodes into subsets called quorums, where every two quorums intersect and no quorum includes another quorum. To accommodate node mobility and network scale, we propose that producers and consumers systematically forward their advertisement and subscription messages to form 'pseudo' quorums, where they are matched at intersecting nodes. Simulation results show that the pseudo quorum based matchmaking system achieves a very high matching rate with much less messaging overhead as compared to that of event and query flooding.

Undergraduate computing degrees have long experienced a gender disparity in enrollment. Research shows that a lack of sense of belonging can negatively impact underrepresented students in higher education, and in the STEM fields. Furthermore, academic self-concept has been demonstrated to support students in persisting and graduating college. However, it is unclear how colleges can utilize interventions to cultivate a sense of belonging and academic self-concept specifically for women in the computing field. Furthermore, research is needed to understand the impacts of career focused academic conference participation for women enrolled in undergraduate computing degrees at commuter institutions. This study examines the impact of participating in a regional Women in Computing conference on their sense of belonging and academic self-concept. This study utilized a quantitative, descriptive approach to examine the experience of 29 undergraduate women interested in the computing field at a teaching college, public institution in the northeast. Participants participated in a pre- and post-conference survey to determine the perceived impacts. Participants were also surveyed one month and eight months after conference attendance to determine longer-term impact. The study findings demonstrate that women computing majors felt an improved sense of belonging and academic self-concept after attending the conference. Students felt more optimistic about their ability to connect with peers, faculty, and industry partners and their ability to persist through the computing degree. Implications for institutions and research are also discussed.

Farmingdale State College (FSC) is primarily a commuter four-year college within a large state college system. Computing degrees at FSC have traditionally struggled with gender disparity in enrollment, consistent with many other national and global computing degrees. While the student enrollment in FSC computing degrees has doubled, the female population has hovered at 8-15% over the last decade. This research study focuses on designing an orientation program for women computing students of FSC and measuring its effectiveness on the female student experience. Details about measurement and assessment of the design decisions and implementation details, and data analysis of pre- and post-orientation survey results from the pilot version of the (re)orientation held in summer 2021 are presented. The main goal of the (re)orientation program is to provide an environment for connections to be established among the small female population enrolled fostering camaraderie and recognition as female students begin their upcoming semester. A secondary goal is for the students to gain familiarity with the campus, department and technical tools used in classes to give an edge to the female students for the new semester. The timing of the (re)orientation session coincided with return to campus after being remote for two and half semesters due to the global COVID19 pandemic and hence implementing the pilot and evaluating its results were additionally important. There is a wide variety in approach, objectives, and outcomes of orientation programs in general, however, it is rare for orientation programs to be focused on gender balance and even more rare in the context of commuter colleges.

Institutions, nationally and internationally, experience a persistent gender imbalance in computing program enrollment. Despite recent initiatives to increase the number of women in computing degree programs, this disparity continues at XYZ College. Educational researchers have demonstrated that increasing students' sense of belonging (SoB) and academic self-concept (ASC) has positive impacts on academic outcomes, particularly for students underrepresented in STEM education. This study investigated how attending a women focused computing conference can impact student attendees' SoB and ASC in short and long term. Students' perception of their experiences and measures of SoB and ASC are obtained through a series of surveys. Due to the large number of last-minute cancellations, this study applies adult constructive development theory (ACDT) to understand why students were hesitant to attend the conference. This study found that attending a women focused computing conference positively impacted students SoB and ASC.

In a match-making system, sources (producers) advertise gen- erated data without any particular destination in mind. Destinations (con- sumers) are determined based on their interests (via subscriptions) in receiv- ing the produced data. Advertisements and subscriptions are matched by the underlying network routing system. We propose to facilitate match-making capability in ad hoc and sensor networks by adapting the idea of quorum system. A quorum system is formed by organizing nodes into subsets called quorums, where every two quorums intersect and no quorum includes an- other quorum. To accommodate node mobility and network scale, we pro- pose that producers and consumers systematically forward their advertise- ment and subscription messages to form 'pseudo' quorums, where they are matched at intersecting nodes. Simulation results shows that pseudo quorum based match-making system achieves a very high matching rate with much less messaging overhead as compared to that of event and query flooding. I. INTRODUCTION A match-making system is different from traditional multicast and any-cast routing systems in the sense that routing is performed based on the data (contents) in the messages, rather than special- ized address attached to the messages. Sources (producers) of data in the network generate messages and advertise them without any particular destination in mind. Destinations (consumers) are de- termined based on their interests (via subscriptions) in receiving the produced data. Advertisements from producers and subscrip- tions from consumers are effectively and efficiently matched by the underlying network routing system (6). A match-making system is applicable to many different net- work types, application domains, and scenarios. For instance, in a battlefield, soldiers (producers) might advertise intelligence they have found out (e.g., enemy camps, weapon depots, or bunkers around), while the commanders (consumers) state what they are interested in. A soldier may also become a consumer if he needs certain information (e.g., any enemy tank less than 2 km away) or help (such as the closest medical equipment or medical care team), while other soldiers become the producers advertising intelligence and/or capability. Another application scenario utilizes a sensor network to monitor hostile environments. For instance, deployed sensors are producers to advertise readings and events they have detected or observed, while some supervisory sensors act as con- sumers by asking various queries regarding the environment. The supervisory sensor nodes aggregate the information and inform the appropriate human supervisors (consumers) according to their interests. Our objective in this paper is to provide a match mak- ing system for both ad hoc networks and sensor networks, where nodes with limited power resources need to communicate with- out any pre-existing infrastructure. For ad hoc networks, node mobility causes dynamically changing topology. For the sensor networks, although nodes may not be mobile, the sheer number of nodes with limited resources poses unique challenges. Thus, a match-making mechanism for ad hoc and sensor networks should take all these stringent requirements into account and be mobility- aware, adaptive, efficient, and scalable. We propose to adopt the notion of a quorum system to facili- tate match-making capability in ad hoc and sensor networks. A quorum system is formed by organizing a collection of objects into subsets called quorums, where every two quorums intersect and no quorum includes another quorum. A formal mathematical definition is as follows. Given the finite set rep-