Dave Eckhardt's Research Interests

Areas of Interest

Operating systems
Computer networks & wireless networks
Distributed systems
File systems

Collaboration Available

While my primary focus at present is on teaching, I am interested in working with students on projects in the following areas:

Automatic configuration of link-level retransmission
Peer-to-peer file system architecture
Distributed operating system structure (mostly in the context of Plan 9).

Completed Projects

Membership on committees of completed thesis projects

Ben Blum. Landslide: Systematic dynamic race detection in kernel space. CMU-CS-12-118 (2012)
Greg Hartman. Attentiveness: Reactivity at Scale. (2010).
Adam Wolbach. Improving the deployability of Diamond. (2008).
Ajay Surie. Improving mobile infrastructure for pervasive personal computing. (2007).
David J. Matsumoto. A hybrid approach to Effort-Limited Fair scheduling in 802.11 (2003).

Ph.D. Dissertation

In May of 2002 I defended my Ph.D. dissertation, titled An Internet-style Approach to Managing Wireless Link Errors. Briefly, I investigated some of what must be done to extend the "Internet experience" across error-prone wireless links. In particular, I argued that protocol-blind link-level adaptive error control is the right solution for bursty packet errors. I then proposed a new notion of fairness for flows traversing noisy links, effort-limited fairness (ELF), which ensures sensible outcomes in response to link capacity loss. Evaluation was based on replaying bit-level error traces past a prototype implementation running in a NetBSD kernel.

Credit Net

Many moons ago, I was part of the Credit Net project.