Bhaskaran Raman
| 475 Soda Hall, |
Apartment G, |
| EECS Dept / CS Division, |
1836 Hearst Avenue, |
| U.C.Berkeley, CA 94720. |
Berkeley, CA 94703. |
| Phone: +1-510-642-8284 |
Phone: +1-510-644-1906 |
| Fax: +1-510-643-7352 |
|
bhaskar@cs.berkeley.edu
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bhaskar/
Research Interests
Computer networks, large-scale Internet-based systems, Internet
middleware for heterogeneous network integration; cross-cutting issues
in networking and distributed systems; mobile and wireless networks.
I'm also particularly interested in the development of appropriate
technology.
Teaching Interests
Graduate as well as undergraduate teaching; computer networks and
protocols, Internet-based distributed systems, wireless networks,
operating systems.
Education
- Aug 1997-present: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Computer
Science
University of California at Berkeley, CA
Research advisor: Prof. Randy H. Katz
Expected date of completion: Dec 2002
Thesis topic: An Architecture for Performance and Availability
Constrained Composition of Services in the Wide-Area Internet
- Aug 1997-May 1999: Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science
University of California at Berkeley, CA
Research advisor: Prof. Randy H. Katz
Thesis topic: Personal Mobility in the ICEBERG Integrated
Communication Network
- Aug 1993-May 1997: Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech) in Computer
Science & Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, India
Research Advisor: Prof. C. R. Muthukrishnan
Research Experience
- Graduate Student Researcher, SAHARA Project, University of
California at Berkeley, EECS Department, Summer 2001 to present.
As a senior graduate student, I am currently playing an active part in
the development of the SAHARA architecture. My PhD thesis explores a
specific form of service composition - the central theme of the
SAHARA project.
- Summer Intern, IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, New York,
1999.
I worked on issues related to service discovery and network
layering in Bluetooth scatternets. (See paper titled ``Arguments for
Cross-layer optimizations in Bluetooth Scatternets'' below).
- Graduate Student Researcher, ICEBERG Project, University of
California at Berkeley, EECS Department, Summer 1998 to Summer 2001.
- I have been part of the team involved with the design of
ICEBERG - an Internet-based architecture for integration of services
across heterogeneous access networks and devices.
- I have played a lead role in the two code releases
of different versions of ICEBERG software.
- In Summer 1998, I worked on building a gateway to interface
cell-phones on a GSM wireless network to the Internet. This was done
as part of testbed development for the ICEBERG project.
- I worked on the design and implementation of the
``Universal Inbox'' for my Master's thesis.
- Graduate Operating Systems Course, University of California
at Berkeley, Fall 1997.
I worked on a project that looked at
techniques for reordering data on the fly in data processing
applications. The idea was to reorder the data based on continuous
user feedback so that the user has control over which data items are
processed first. (See under ``publications'' below).
Teaching and Mentoring Experience
- Summer 2000: Mentor for SUPERB (Summer Undergraduate Program for
Engineering Research at Berkeley), U.C.Berkeley. I mentored the
student for a project involving the development of a voice-response
user-interface. The interface was for a piece of the Universal-Inbox
that read out email to users over a cellular-phone.
- Summer 1998 to Summer 1999: Mentor for undergraduate student
working on a project within the scope of the ICEBERG project. He
developed a graphical user-interface for management of the
user-preference profiles of the Universal-Inbox architecture.
- Fall 1997, Spring 1998: Teaching Assistant for CS61a -
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", U.C.Berkeley. My
work involved managing lab sessions, discussion sessions to supplement
class-room teaching, as well as inputs toward setting examination
questions.
- Fall 1996, Spring 1997: Teaching Assistant for CS110 -
"Introduction to Computing", Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
My responsibilities included helping students in lab sessions, as well
as setting programming assignments for these sessions.
Publications
- ``An Architecture for Highly Available Wide-Area Service
Composition'', Bhaskaran Raman and Randy H. Katz, Computer
Communications Journal, special issue on ``Recent Advances in
Communication Networking'', May 2003.
- ``Load Balancing and Stability Issues in Algorithms for Service
Composition'', Bhaskaran Raman and Randy H. Katz, The 22nd Annual
Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies,
IEEE INFOCOM, Apr 2003. [Acceptance rate: 21%].
- ``Emulation-based Evaluation of an Architecture for Wide-Area
Service Composition'', Bhaskaran Raman and Randy H. Katz,
International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and
Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS 2002), July 2002.
[Acceptance rate: 60%].
- ``The SAHARA Model for Service Composition Across Multiple
Providers'', Bhaskaran Raman, Sharad Agarwal, Yan Chen, Matthew
Caesar, Weidong Cui, Per Johansson, Kevin Lai, Tal Lavian, Sridhar
Machiraju, Z. Morley Mao, George Porter, Timothy Roscoe, Mukund
Seshadri, Jimmy Shih, Keith Sklower, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian,
Takashi Suzuki, Shelley Zhuang, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy H. Katz, Ion
Stoica, Invited Paper, International Conference on Pervasive
Computing (Pervasive 2002), Aug 2002.
- ``Arguments for Cross-Layer Optimizations in Bluetooth
Scatternets'', Bhaskaran Raman, Pravin Bhagwat, and Srinivasan Seshan,
Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT'01), Jan
2001. [Acceptance rate: 18.5%].
- ``Universal Inbox: Providing Extensible Personal Mobility and
Service Mobility in an Integrated Communication Network'', Bhaskaran
Raman, Randy H. Katz, and Anthony D. Joseph, Workshop on Mobile
Computing Systems and Applications (WMSCA'00), Dec 2000.
[Acceptance rate: 37.7%].
- ``ICEBERG: An Internet-core Network Architecture for Integrated
Communications'', Helen J. Wang, Bhaskaran Raman, Chen-nee Chuah,
Rahul Biswas, Ramakrishna Gummadi, Barbara Hohlt, Xia Hong, Emre
Kiciman, Zhuoqing Mao, Jimmy S. Shih, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian,
Ben Y. Zhao, Anthony D. Joseph, and Randy H. Katz, IEEE Personal
Communications, Aug 2000: Special Issue on IP-based Mobile
Telecommunication Networks.
- ``The ICEBERG Project: Defining the IP and Telecom
Intersection'', Bhaskaran Raman, Helen J. Wang, Jimmy S. Shih, Anthony
D. Joseph, and Randy H. Katz, IT Professional, Nov/Dec 1999.
- ``Online Dynamic Reordering for Interactive Data Processing'',
Vijayshankar Raman, Bhaskaran Raman, and Joseph M. Hellerstein,
Proc. of the 25th International Conference on Very Large Databases
(VLDB), September 1999. (Selected one of the best papers).
[Acceptance rate: 16%].
Theses
- ``An Architecture for Performance and Availability Constrained
Service Composition in the Wide-Area Internet'', Bhaskaran Raman, PhD
Thesis, In Preparation.
- ``Personal Mobility in the ICEBERG Integrated Communication
Network'', Bhaskaran Raman, Master's Thesis, EECS Department,
U.C.Berkeley, May 1999.
- ``A Portable User-Level Thread Package'', Bhaskaran Raman,
B. Tech Project Report, May 1997.
Selected Posters and Presentations
- ``Service Encapsulation in ICEBERG'', Presentation at Ericsson,
End of the ICEBERG Review, Sweden, Jun 2001.
- ``A Framework for Highly Available Internet Services'',
Bhaskaran Raman and Prof. Randy H. Katz, SIGCOMM'00 Student Poster
Session, Aug 2000.
- ``Universal Inbox for Personal Mobility and Service Mobility'',
Presentation at Ericsson, ICEBERG Project Review, Sweden, Aug 2000.
- ``Walkthrough of ICEBERG V0.0 Release'', Presentation at the
Endeavour Retreat, Jun 2000.
Professional Activities
Student member of IEEE (Communications Society, Computer Society),
Student member of ACM
Refereed papers for ASPLOS 1998, ACM Mobicom 1998/1999/2000, WMCSA
2000, IEEE Infocom 2000/2001, IEEE Personal Communications Magazine
2001.
Honors
- Ranked 12th (100,000 total candidates) in the Joint Entrance
Examination for admission to the Indian Institute of Technology - 1993
- Recipient of National Talent Scholarship (1991-1997)
- Placed among top 0.1% of students in Mathematics in All India
Senior School Certificate Examination - 1991
Other Activities
I'm an active volunteer for ``Asha for Education''
(http://www.ashanet.org/), an organization that works to promote basic
education in India.
References
- Dr. Randy H. Katz
Professor,
Department of EECS,
637 Soda Hall #1776,
University of California at Berkeley,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1776.
E-mail: randy@cs.berkeley.edu
Tel: +1-510-642-8778,
Fax: +1-510-643-7352
- Dr. Anthony D. Joseph
Assistant Professor,
Department of EECS,
675 Soda Hall #1776,
University of California at Berkeley,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1776.
E-mail: adj@cs.berkeley.edu
Tel: +1-510-643-7212,
Fax: +1-510-643-7352
- Dr. Srinivasan Seshan
Assistant Professor,
School of Computer Science, 8212 Wean Hall,
Carnegie Mellon University,
5000 Forbes Ave,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891.
E-mail: srini@cmu.edu
Tel: +1-412-268-8734,
Fax: +1-412-268-5576
- Dr. Pravin Bhagwat
Principal Architect, ReefEdge, Inc.
Visiting Faculty,
Computer Science & Engineering Department,
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur,
Kanpur - 208 016 (UP), India.
E-mail: pravin@acm.org, pravin@cse.iitk.ac.in
Tel: +91-512-59-7576
PhD Thesis Summary
An Architecture for Performance and Availability Constrained
Service Composition in the Wide-Area Internet
Service Composition offers flexible ways to quickly enable new
application functionality by putting together existing components.
Unix pipelining is a very simple example of composition. In my
thesis, I focused on the scenario where there are multiple service
providers that develop, implement, deploy, and manage different
component services at different points on the Internet. Other portal
providers compose a set of these services to enable new
applications. An example of such a model in today's Internet is the
Yahoo portal making use of a third-party search engine to provide an
end service to its subscribers. Such a model is likely to emerge
given the importance of services in 3G+ networks. There are several
multimedia applications that can built on this framework of
composition - for instance, we built an application that was capable
of reading out news to a cell-phone user, by composing a news source
service with a text-to-speech conversion engine component.
While past work has addressed performance and fault-tolerance issues
in service composition within a single service provider cluster,
composition in our scenario brings up new challenges. Since service
providers are independent, the components could be spread across the
wide-area Internet. This makes it challenging to choose a set
of service instances for a particular client session (more challenging
than the problem of single web-mirror selection), based on
current network and server performance. Further, studies by Labovitz
et.al. have shown that Internet path availability can be very poor,
and also inter-domain path recovery can take several minutes.
Improving this availability by detecting and recovering from failures
quickly is a challenge that I address in my work.
In my thesis, I have proposed and prototyped an architecture to
address these performance and availability issues in service
composition. My architecture is based on an overlay network of
service execution platforms. The execution platforms form the
middleware layer on which providers deploy their services. And the
overlay network provides the context for exchange of network/server
performance information exchange - this enables an "optimal" choice
of service instances for client sessions. Further, the overlay
network also allows detection of network path failures, and the
subsequent choice of alternate service instances. Some of the key
design features of this architecture are: (a) the separation of
service location information from that of performance/liveness
information, (b) the client session is setup as a virtual-circuit in
the overlay network - this means that session recovery on failure
need not depend on the propagation and stabilization of the failure
information across the network, and (c) the use of soft-state to
maintain the virtual circuit - this makes it easy to implement
session tear-down in a distributed fashion.
I have built a prototype of the system, and evaluated it using an
emulation platform - there is an actual implementation of the
algorithms and interfaces, and the wide-area network characteristics
are emulated to study issues of time-to-session-recovery,
scaling, and stability. My evaluations show that multi-media sessions
can be recovered within a few seconds after wide-area network failure.
This represents a significant improvement over Internet-path recovery
which takes several 10s of seconds to several minutes.
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The translation was initiated by Bhaskaran Raman on 2002-11-11
Bhaskaran Raman
2002-11-11