Until recently, most dense deployments of wireless networks were in campus-like environments, where experts carefully plan cell layout. The recent rapid deployment of inexpensive 802.11 hardware and other personal wireless technology (cordless phones, bluetooth, etc.) is quickly changing the wireless landscape. The resulting dense deployment of wireless networking equipment in areas such as neighborhoods and shopping malls, differ from campus-like deployments in several important ways: (1) they are unplanned and, therefore, result in highly variable densities of wireless nodes, and (2) they are unmanaged and, therefore, configuring, troubleshooting, etc. cannot be performed efficiently. This project uses the term chaotic deployments or chaotic networks to refer to collections of wireless networks with these two properties. As wireless networks become more common and more densely packed, more of these chaotic deployments will suffer from serious contention, poor performance, and security problems. This will seriously hinder the deployment and use of these infrastructures, negating many of the benefits offered by wireless networks. This project explores solving this problem by making chaotic networks self-managing. For example, this includes developing techniques that automate both the configuration and runtime management of wireless devices. This project is exploring these issues for both current wireless systems, such as 802.11, and future radio technologies, such as cognitive radios, which require more complex configuration. The long-term impact of this project is that it is improving our understanding of how unlicensed spectrum is used and providing better guidance on how such spectrum should be managed in the future.
