Sriram Lakshmanan

About me

I am was a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA where I worked on wireless networked systems. My past work includes developing Smart WiFi solutions, Long-lasting Wireless Sensor Networks and New Wireless Networking paradigms. My work on securing wireless networks using smart antennas has won awards at multiple venues.

I completed my Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech., in December 2007 and my Bachelor of in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India. I graduated from Georgia Tech. with a Ph.D. in 2011.

News

• I am currently a Wireless Systems Engineer at Ruckus Wireless Inc.
• My paper on fast rate adaptation with 802.11n links has been accepted to the IEEE Infocom Mini-conference 2011.

Research Summary [Detailed Research Description]

My research interest is in mobile and wireless networked systems. I have worked on several interesting projects in wireless networking during my Ph.D. at Georgia Tech. My research can be categorized into four broad areas: Spatial-Security, Smart WiFi, Long-lasting Wireless Sensor Networks and Novel Paradigms & Applications. I really like building practical systems and consequently, my works have a strong systems' component. A summary of my research is presented below.

Spatial Security: is a new approach to securing wireless networks where information access is limited at a spatial level using advanced communication and processing techniques. The repeated failure of current wireless techniques is due primarily because current wireless security techniques have just been simple adaptations of those developed for wired networks. In this work, we use smart antennas and cooperation among access points to limit the information from eavesdroppers without relying on computational complexity. This approach is complementary to existing security techniques and can be applied to other problems such as privacy and denial of service attacks in wireless networks. Given the growth of smartphones and wireless enabled devices, such techniques that specifically secure the wireless link become essential.

Smart WiFi: is a new architecture for Wireless LANs which leverages smart antennas and node cooperation to achieve different network performance objectives such as robustness to channel impairments, reduction of interference among co-channel links, increased capacity in high-density deployments and quick adaptation to environmental changes. One of the important advantages of the beamforming solutions developed in this project is that they do not require sophisticated physical layer channel estimates and can consequently deliver benefits even with Off-the-shelf wireless clients.

Long Lasting Sensor Networks: is a broad umbrella of works that target the design of multi-hop wireless networks which are both high-performance and energy-efficient. Specific works include cooperative routing, multi-radio operation for high-capacity backhaul networks and gateway association in wireless mesh networks.

New Paradigms & Applications: In this class of works, I focus on new networking approaches which transcend the boundaries of traditional networking. Two specific instances are: (1) Cue-based Networking, where a sensor network generates cues that are provided to an information-sensitive application (such as video delivery over IP) to optimize the performance of the networked application. (2) Networking among nano-scale systems where traditional assumptions and models do not hold due to the small dimensions.

Research Highlights:

My work on securing wireless networks against eavesdropping using smart antennas has won multiple awards including the Cyber-Security Applied Research award at the Cyber-Security Awareness Week 2009, the best poster award at the Georgia Tech. Graduate Technical Symposium 2010 and was selected as one among the top ten finalists for the Georgia Tech-Edison Innovation challenge 2010. My work on beamforming using off-the-shelf wireless clients has also attracted significant appreciation from academia and industry at various forums.

Colloborators

Georgia Tech: Raghupathy Sivakumar, Mary Ann Ingram, Nikil Jayant.

NEC Laboratories America: Karthikeyan Sundaresan, Sampath Rangarajan, Ravi Kokku, Mohammed Khojestepour.

Hewlett Packard Laboratories: Sung-Ju Lee, Jeongkeun Lee, Raul Etkin, Sujata Banerjee.