The Grid Ad Hoc Networking Project

Grid is a system for routing in wireless ad hoc mobile networks. Grid is developed by MIT LCS's Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group. We've deployed Grid in two test-beds: a 29-node network in the LCS building, and a 50-node rooftop network with nodes in graduate students' apartments in Cambridge (shown at right). See the Roofnet homepage if you are interested in hosting a node for the outdoor network or want more information about that specific project. The Grid network software is publicly available as open source, see the software page.

The main focuses of our current work are:

Finding high-throughput routes despite lossy radio links.
Better MAC protocols for ad-hoc forwarding.
Understanding potential system capacity and efficient spectrum use.

We also work in the following areas:

Scalable ad-hoc routing protocols.
Battery-friendly communication protocols.
Geographic forwarding and distributed location databases.
Secure forwarding despite misbehaving nodes.

Publications

Our work is documented in a series of papers, technical reports, and theses. A complete listing can be found on our publications page.

You might be looking for one of the following papers:

Opportunistic Routing in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks. In HotNets-II (2003).
A High-Throughput Path Metric for Multi-Hop Wireless Routing. In MobiCom '03.
Performance of Multihop Wireless Networks: Shortest Path is Not Enough. In HotNets-I (2002).
Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. In MobiCom '01.
A Scalable Location Service for Geographic Ad Hoc Routing. In MobiCom '00.

People

Robert Morris, Frans Kaashoek, David Karger, Daniel Aguayo, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Douglas De Couto, Jinyang Li.

Alums: Benjamin Chambers, John Jannotti, Hu Imm Lee.

Software

We have developed a wide variety of software, all of which is publicly available as open source. Our DSDV, DSR, and geographic forwarding implementations run on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOS X. We have deployed Grid using iPaqs (StrongARM CPU) and a variety of Intel i386 laptops and desktop machines. The code is available as part of the Click modular router. More details on obtaining and running the code can be found on our software page.

The simulation code used for the MobiCom '00 and MobiCom '01 papers can be found on our simulation page.

Roofnet / Testbeds

hark! a wireless
machine reboots silently
beep floppy zz-zzt.
-- Michael Taylor

We use two wireless testbeds to run experiments and learn how wireless routing protocols work in the wild, outside of the perfect world of simulators. The first testbed is 29-node experimental indoor network, while the second testbed is 50-node rooftop network, which provides Internet access to MIT affiliates. Although testbed experiments are rarely exactly repeatable, we've found that they give us better insight into wireless system design than simulations.

FAQ

Some frequently asked questions are answered on our FAQ page.

Contact Us

If you have questions or comments about the Grid project, you can contact us by emailing grid@pdos.lcs.mit.edu.

Last modified: $Date: 2003/12/02 20:34:38 $