"You're sitting at work and you want to know if you've closed the garage door. How do you find the two or three cameras monitoring your garage, among the many devices in your home?" asks Hari Balakrishnan.

"This is the kind of question we're likely to pose in the next five to ten years, he says, as we start linking everything from cameras to coffee machines to the Internet. Networks of the near future will enable us to run home appliances, monitor office equipment, gather information from remote sensors, and operate many other devices.

All of this will require careful planning. Balakrishnan and his research group of ten students are now developing ways to effectively support networks of devices (in addition to computers) on the Internet, such as those envisioned by the Oxygen project. The team aims to keep the Internet functioning smoothly as devices generating video, audio, sensor readings, and other data formats are added on. "Our problem is to ensure that we can still have a good network architecture, get good performance, and have a robust system," says Balakrishnan. Towards that end, his research group is tackling two major projects -- Wireless Networks of Devices (WIND) and the Congestion Manager (CM).

WIND is a system of middleware and protocols that will support new applications in dynamic, mobile networks of devices, sensors, actuators, and computers. Its primary design goal is to make networks self-configuring and applications self-organizing, so they can discover services and function without manual intervention. WIND project research areas include automatic network configuration in ad hoc environments, packet routing, adaptation to changing network conditions, security/privacy problems, and resource discovery. To enable automatic discovery and use of computers, devices, and other resources in dynamic, mobile networks, the group has designed an innovative "Intentional Naming System."

As a host of new devices and applications get networked, the Congestion Manager will be used to monitor and optimize Internet performance. Unlike the standard protocol TCP, the CM can efficiently handle increasing Internet congestion due to audio, video, and other real-time streaming applications, as well as from multiple short Web connections frequently launched by Web browsers. Preliminary results from simulations of the CM architecture show its effectiveness in enabling networks to expeditiously manage Internet congestion from these sources, and applications to easily adapt to changing network conditions. A prototype is now in development.

"I think life will become easier if a lot of things in our daily physical world are networked," says Balakrishnan, who joined LCS in September 1998. He became an EECS Assistant Professor after completing a PhD thesis on reliable data transport over wireless networks at the University of California, Berkeley's EECS department. The thesis garnered the Association for Computing Machinery's doctoral dissertation award. Balakrishnan currently teaches Computer Networks (6.892) and Computer Systems Engineering (6.033).