Srinivasan Seshan
Joseph Traub Professor of Computer Science; Department Head, Computer Science Department
Office 7019 Gates & Hillman Centers
Email srini@cs.cmu.edu
Phone (412) 268-8734
Department
Computer Science Department
SCS Dean's Office
Administrative Support Person
Diana Hyde
Research Interests
Distributed Systems
Mobile and Pervasive Computing
Networking
Systems
Advisees
Anup Agarwal
Christopher Canel
Shawn Chen
Sagar Kalasibail Seetharam
Ray Ware
Research/Teaching Statement
My primary interests are in the broad areas of network protocols and distributed network applications. In the past, I have worked on topics such as transport/routing protocol interactions with wireless networks, sensor networking, fast protocol stack implementations, RAID system design, performance prediction for Internet transfers, firewall design, and improvements to the TCP protocol. The following two projects are examples of my current research efforts.
Next Generation Network Architectures. While the Internet has been a great success and supported a wide range of interesting applications, its design is beginning to show its age. My current research is exploring new network protocols and entire network architectures that address the network's shortcomings and provide better support for the next generation of Internet applications. The eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) project is a part of this work that explores a clean-slate redesign of the Internet architecture. The primary goal of the XIA architecture is to create a robust and reliable network that easily supports the evolution of in-network functionality over time. In addition to XIA, my research also explores implications of the fact that video content delivery now dominates all forms of traffic on the Internet and is likely to continue dominating for the foreseeable future. My group is exploring both new protocols, content delivery mechanisms and network management techniques that both address the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities created by this flood of video traffic.
Wireless Networks and Mobile Systems. Over the past few years smartphones have gone from being a relatively rarity to becoming nearly ubiquitous. These phones are one of the few items that we take almost everywhere. People use phones to take photos, make appointments, find restaurants, browse the Web and keep in touch with their social and business contacts. The information that we reveal to these smartphones and their ability to make observations about their surroundings give them the unique ability to make observations about our lifestyles and our environment in a highly detailed fashion. My research explores the systems challenges in making these observations useful and accessible. This includes designing the software on devices to accurately collect data in a power- efficient fashion, designing changes to the infrastructure to enable the efficient and scalable collection of data from handsets, and managing the privacy issues that arise from this data collection.