UMIACS researchers are addressing a wide range of systems issues that are fundamental to the design of real-time systems, computer networks, and mobile computing.

Real-Time Systems:

This research involves the design and implementation of real-time systems working in distributed environments that provide fault tolerant operations. These activities are organized in two projects: Maruti Project and Time Ware. The Maruti Project is aimed at developing technology for the design and implementation of Mission-critical applications. The project encompasses a real-time operating system for online management of resources, as well as a suite of tools to support all major phases of application development. The Time Ware Project is devoted to building tools for the design and implementation of concurrent, real-time systems.

Computer Networking:

Research in networks emphasizes routing systems, in particular, the development of (1) a routing testbed (MaRS) that is publicly available and being used by other researchers and teachers; (2) scalable algorithms for policy and type-of-service routing; (3) numerical methods to evaluate the performance and interaction of admission, routing, and scheduling algorithms.

Mobile Computing:

The impact of mobility on the various layers of the network hierarchy motivates the issues being addressed by this research. In particular, simple modifications built on top of the internet protocols have been shown to provide continuous access to mobile hosts regardless of their location. An approach to counter the performance degradation caused by the complex interaction of transport protocols and burst errors on wireless channels is being developed.