Milenko Petrović

Ph.D. (Graduated July 2007)

EECG, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Toronto

Mailing address:
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Graduate Office
University of Toronto
10 King's College Road
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G4, Canada
Office: BA4186, Bahen Center for Information Technology
Phone: 416-946-8669
Email: petrovi hat eecg.toronto.edu

Research Interests

My main area of research is data-centric networking in the contexts of mobile distributed systems and middleware for the semantic web. Data-centric networking relies on content addressing instead of host (e.g., IP) addressing for participating nodes, thus providing network independence for applications.

Data-centric networking is particularly important for networks supporting mobile clients. In such networks, client applications want to receive data specific to them, regardless of where that data is located in the network. Network independence, through data-centric networking, makes it easier to develop robust mobile applications that are resilient to network dynamics.

Data-centric routing is fundamentally different from host-based routing because data is routed based on queries describing user's interest, rather than host addresses. As more and more applications depend on XML and RDF for data representation, there is a growing need for efficient data-centric routing protocols that can support a kind of query language expressiveness that is needed for routing XML/RDF data.

My research forms a basis for mBaze, an application development platform for mobile devices. The platform is being developed by Eximius Mobility.

Research Projects

Middleware for Automation Applications in Sensor/Actuator Networks

We have developed a middleware system to address the challenge of in-network actuation for automation applications using embedded sensor/actuator technology. The middleware system combines a number of devices to create a declarative data flow management systems for in-network execution of distributed automation applications. [more]

The key features of the middleware are:

Mobility in Publish/Subscribe Systems

Publish/Subscribe interaction model provides a data-centric network abstraction for developing distributed applications. By allowing applications to specify data that they are interested in receiving by name, rather then by explicit network location, makes application independent of the underlying network transport. This makes writing distributed application much easier and simpler, since the applications do not need to know explicitly about network reconfiguration. In other words, publish/subscribe paradigm allows creation of application-level network virtualization. [more]

Publications

Middleware for the Semantic Web

The main benefit of publish/subscribe communication model lies in the abstraction of addressing. In essence, pub/sub creates data-addressable networks. The goal of this project is to examine data-centric abstractions that would be considered useful for application development in the future. We used the emerging areas of distributed application development such as web service integration and collaboration as a guide to what would be considered useful for a number of applications. [more]

Publications

Using TCP over Wireless Links

Congestion avoidance algorithms used in TCP were one of the main reasons for TCPs good performance in wired networks. However, the algorithms are also the main culprit of TCP's poor performance over wireless links. The problems stems from TCP's inability to distinguish packet losses due to congestion from those caused by wireless transmission errors. Consequently, congestion avoidance is invoked much more frequently than it needs to be causing TCP flows to experience low throughput. The purpose of this research was to study the effectiveness of using forward error correction to mask wireless transmission errors for soft real-time and bulk traffic in cellular as well as MANET environments.

Publications

Graduate Courses

Teaching assistantship

MSRG

All my research is done within middleware systems research group (MSRG) at University of Toronto. MSRG conducts research on content-based routing systems and aspect-oriented software architecture of middleware. Projects range from the design of data-centric routing protocols and query languages to aspect-oriented software architectures, focusing on information management in a wide range of environments starting from super-constrained sensor networks to pervasive environments to semantic web middleware. Professor Arno Jacobsen teaches a class, Trends in Middleware Systems (ECE1770), which introduces this research area.