Students will investigate some important issues related to software-defined networking/virtualization, visual computing at the network edge, social virtual reality, mobile sensing & environment recognition.

As broadband services and mobile devices proliferate, consumers are migrating towards advanced social, information-intensive, and personalized services. The fast pace of growth, improvement to quality of life, and significant economic contribution of networked consumer systems have been receiving increasing attention. Technical challenges in this field include quality of service, network and device heterogeneity, network performance, mobility, device intelligence, security and privacy, and user experience and knowledge, etc. In this REU Site, students will participate and develop new skills in ongoing funded research projects of the faculty mentors by investigating, implementing, and testing viable solutions to technical challenges in consumer networking technologies. This research activity will allow the students to obtain a better understanding of the technical issues, performance, and trade-offs in consumer networking. Exposing the students to collaborative research environments, fostering their enthusiasm for science and engineering, and developing skills needed for pursuing advanced degrees in research is a goal of this program.