News & Events

• Infocom 2013 submission accepted
• I no longer work for Telekom Innovation Laboratories. I'm now Senior Innovation Engineer in the Strategy & Innovation Group of Swisscom
• Submission at HotSDN workshop accepted
• Infocom 2012 submission with Mustafa Al-Bado and Cigdem Sengul is accepted: "What Details are Needed for Wireless Simulations? - A Study of a Site-Specific Indoor Wireless Model". doi.
• Paper with Manuel Flury and Jean-Yves Le Boudec on synchronization with energy-detection receivers in IEEE 802.15.4a networks is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. doi.
• Our Mobicom 2011 submission is accepted: "Enhance & Explore: an Adaptive Algorithm to Maximize the Utility of Wireless Networks" with Adel Aziz, Julien Herzen, Seva Shneer and Patrick Thiran. Paper on infoscience
• I'll be a speaker at the 4th international workshop on femtocells, on June 22nd, in London.
• NS-3 Summer of Code 2011: NSOC
• Our TCPSpeaker work was an ACM SRC finalist at ACM Mobicom 2010.

Bio

Ruben is a Senior Innovation Engineer and Technical Expert in Mobile Networking in the Strategy & Innovation Group of Swisscom where he works on product innovation and development. From 2008 to 2012, he was a Senior Research Scientist in the Internet Network Architecture group of (Deutsche) Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin, Germany.

He earned his PhD and MSc in Communication Systems from the School of Computer and Communication Systems, EPFL in 2008 and 2003, respectively.

In 2001, he interned as a software engineer for Fast Forward Networks in San Francisco, California. From August 2002 to March 2003, he carried out his Master thesis at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD) in India. He was then a PhD student at LCA from 2003 to 2008, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Yves Le Boudec. He was awarded a best student paper award at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICU 2005) and a best demo award at the 2006 MICS Scientific Conference for the demo "An Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wide Band Testbed with Interference".

Research

I'm broadly intested in networked systems, with an emphasis on wireless networks. In general I enjoy designing, modeling and running performance evaluations of wireless systems. Recently, I've spent most of my time working on home networking and cellular access systems. When it comes to performance evaluation, I tend to use whatever tool or technique is the most appropriate, either via simulation, analytical techniques or testbed deployments.

Ongoing Projects

• Odin: an experimental SDN framework for enterprise wireless networks ( Lalith's blog post on Odin).
• SAW: distributed spectrum assignements for WLANs. This is a collaboration with Julien Herzen and Patrick Thiran at EPFL.
• Interference management for femtocell networks. Collaboration with Raymond Knopp at Eurecom, more details soon.

Older Projects

• Berlin Open Wireless Lab (BOWL): The BOWL project operates a campus-wide, close to production, wireless research network for experimentation in a realistic environment. It is a unique infrastructure since (1) live traffic can be safely transported over a research network running experimental protocols, (2) its reconfiguration capabilities allow researchers to use the network with different operational modes (for instance, an infrastructure network or a mesh network), and (3) researchers can easily design and evaluate protocols at the network layer and above.
• Enhance & Explore: an adaptive algorithm to maximize the utility of wireless networks. This is a really cool algorithm that can maximize the utility of a wireless network, without the need to explicitely characterize the capacity. This is a collaboration with Adel Aziz, Julien Herzen and Patrick Thiran at EPFL.
• OFELIA: OpenFlow in Europe - linking infrastructure and applications
• ns-3 network simulator: testbed in a simulator | ns-3-click (GSOC 2010 mentorship - summary) | ns-3 Minstrel integration (GSOC 2009 mentorship - summary)
• Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) Networking

Publications & Code

Some selected publications

• Julien Herzen, Ruben Merz, and Patrick Thiran. Distributed spectrum assignment for home wlans. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '13), Turin, Italy, April 2013. IEEE, New York, NY, USA.
• Lalith Suresh, Julius Schulz-Zander, Ruben Merz, Anja Feldmann, and Teresa Vazao. Towards programmable enterprise wlans with odin. In Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking (HotSDN '12), August 2012.
• Mustafa Al-Bado, Cigdem Sengul, and Ruben Merz. What details are needed for wireless simulations? – a study of a site-specific indoor wireless model. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '12), New York, NY, USA, March 2012. IEEE.
• Adel Aziz, Julien Herzen, Ruben Merz, Seva Shneer, and Patrick Thiran. Enhance & explore: an adaptive algorithm to maximize the utility of wireless networks. In 17th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom '11), pages 157–168, New York, NY, USA, September 2011. ACM SIGMOBILE, ACM. (doi:10.1145/2030613.2030632)
• Manuel Flury, Ruben Merz, and Jean-Yves Le Boudec. Synchronization for impulse-radio uwb with energy-detection and multi-user interference: Algorithms and application to ieee 802.15.4a. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 59(11):5458–5472, 2011. (doi:10.1109/TSP.2011.2163400)
• Ruben Merz and Jean-Yves Le Boudec. Performance evaluation of impulse radio UWB networks using common or private acquisition preambles. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 8(7):865–879, July 2009. (doi:10.1109/TMC.2008.163)

See full list of publications

Code

The following needs to be completed

• Several Matlab simulations
• ns-2 UWB simulator (here) and matlab & C code of related publication (here).
• Some work on ns-3: current patch on queue state control
• Various contributions to the Click modular router
• A few OpenWrt packages: libtrace, harpoon, Click, ccnx, liboml

Collaborators

• Mustafa Al Bado, Anja Feldmann, Harald Schioeberg, Cigdem Sengul, Philipp Schmidt, Lalith Suresh at Telekom Innovation Laboratories/TU Berlin
• Patrick Thiran, Julien Herzen and Adel Aziz at EPFL
• Tania Villa and Raymond Knopp at Eurecom
• Jean-Yves Le Boudec, Bozidar Radunovic, Manuel Flury, Joerg Widmer at EPFL during my PhD time