Bio



Research Assistant / Post-Doc

Julius Schulz-Zander is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Fraunhofer HHI and TU Berlin. He received his Doctoral degree in CS from the Technische Universität Berlin early 2016. He is broadly interested in networking, wireless communications, and embedded systems. His current research is centered around bringing SDN into IEEE 802.11-based networks. Julius received his Dr.-Ing. begining of 2016 and his Diploma degree in CS from TU Berlin in 2011. In 2009, he spent the Summer in Prof. Nick McKeown's group at Stanford University, where he ported OpenFlow to OpenWrt. Since 2007 he works on the Berlin Open Wireless Lab project with over 100 WiFi nodes, after he joined Prof. Anja Feldmann's group as a student worker. Julius is an alumni of the Software Campus executives development program, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

View my profile on LinkedIn

Research Projects

Software-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN)

OpenSDWN

OpenSDWN, a novel WiFi architecture which combines the benefits of WiFi, SDN and NFV. OpenSDWN exploits datapath programmability to enable service differentiation and fine-grained transmission control, facilitating the prioritization of critical applications. OpenSDWN implements per-client virtual access points and per-client virtual middleboxes, to render network functions more flexible and support mobility and seamless migration. OpenSDWN can also be used to out-source the control over the home network to a participatory interface or to an Internet Service Provider.

For more information, please visit OpenSDWN.com

Odin

With wireless technologies becoming prevalent at the last hop, today’s network operators need to manage WiFi access networks in unison with their wired counterparts. However, the non-uniformity of feature sets in existing solutions and the lack of programmability makes this a challenging task. This paper proposes Odin, an SDN-based solution to bridge this gap. With Odin, we make the following contributions: (i) Light Virtual Ac- cess Points (LVAPs), a novel programming abstraction for addressing the IEEE 802.11 protocol stack complex- ity, (ii) a design and implementation for a software- defined WiFi network architecture based on LVAPs, and (iii) a prototype implementation on top of commodity access point hardware without modifications to the IEEE 802.11 client, making it practical for today’s deployments.

For more information, please visit sdn.inet.tu-berlin.de

Selected Publications


2014: Programmatic Orchestration of WiFi Networks
Julius Schulz-Zander, Lalith Suresh, Nadi Sarrar, Anja Feldmann, Thomas Hühn, and Ruben Merz
 In USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 14),

2015: Programming Abstractions for Software-Defined Wireless Networks
Roberto Riggio, Karina Marina, Julius Schulz-Zander, Slawomir Kuklinski, and Tinku Rasheed
 IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.

Please visit my Google Scholar profile for a complete list of publications.

Research Projects

Software Campus SDWN Project

The goal of this project is a Software-Defined Wireless Network for enterprise and internet service provider. This project is funded by the Software Campus program Software Campus program

Berlin Open Wireless Lab

Overview

BOWL is a project of the Intelligent Networks (INET). The main goal of the BOWL project is to provide an open research platform for the wireless networking community. As our outdoor testbed also serves to provide access to the TU Berlin community, BOWL creates a unique opportunity for understanding the real-world performance of proposed solutions. Most importantly, wireless networking research needs no more to be confined to simulation or emulation in fully controlled lab environments.

Testbed

The BOWL project maintains a reconfigurable wireless outdoor testbed with over 60 access points. The network can be configured to serve as an infrastructure access network, a mesh network or as a wireless backhaul. This testbed is integrated to TU-Berlin's IT department (tubIT) and its infrastructure for student access. For smaller experiments or for experiments that are not ready to be tested in an environment with real users, there also exists an indoor testbed.*

Software

The BOWL project maintains and develops several software packages to handle OpenWrt-based WiFi Networks. See github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab for more information.

Contact Section

Contact information is listed on my group's website