WALAN Completed Projects

• Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks
  The main goal of this project is to develop a routing protocol specifically designed for wireless mesh networks.
  Sponsor: Center for Advanced Computing and Communication

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• Performance Evaluation of Wireless Mesh Networks
  The first goal of this project is to evaluate the capacity of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). The second goal is to determine forwarding strategies capable of ensuring fairness and QoS in WMNs.
  Sponsor: Center for Advanced Computing and Communication

• RaPTEX: Rapid Prototyping of Embedded Communication Systems

  Many embedded systems rely upon communication systems to exchange information and coordinate activities in spatially distributed applications. Developing communication systems which are quick, reliable, energy-efficient and error-free is a challenge due to the many trade-offs which must be made. Furthermore, software implementations are typically inefficient due to how they are written.

  This project is developing new ways to develop and implement communication protocols for embedded networks using a building-block approach. A tool (RaPTEX) is being developed which offers a collection of commonly used protocol components which the developer tunes and interconnects as needed for the application. The tool then generates an efficient program from these components using various optimizations, including software thread integration. The tool also estimates protocol performance and computational requirements, allowing system designers to have quick feedback on the impact of design decisions.

  Sponsor: NSF CSR-EHS grant CNS-0509162.

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• Wireless Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges
  The goal of this project is to increase the lifetime of a battery-powered sensor network using a combination of scheduling and power aware routing for continuous monitoring sensor networks. The motivating application is structural health monitoring of building and bridges.
  Sponsor: National Science Foundation and the Center for Advanced Computing and Communication

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• Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

  In most sensor networks likely all sensed data is of very little use without temporal and spatial coordinates. Once deployed, the sensor nodes have to determine their position. GPS provides this information accurately but also expensively (in terms of money and resources). The goal of this project is to determine the location of every sensor nodes without the use of GPS receiver on every node.
  Sponsor: N/A

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• Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

  The goal of this project is to synchronize a large wireless sensor network efficiently, accurately and robustly.
  Sponsor: N/A

• Mobility Modeling

  The primary goal of the study is mobility modeling and generation. In contrast to existing work, the work focuses on modeling the mobility patterns from real scenarios and emulating such patterns in synthetic mobility traces that can be used for creating realistic simulation environments. The proposed model has the desirable characteristics that it is customizable to match any real scenario (e.g., buses in a city, students in a campus, or zebras in a herd), while allowing for convenient diversification (i.e., allows changing the number of nodes, density, etc.).
  Sponsor: NSF
  

• OSPF Extensions for MANETs

  OSPF has emerged as the de facto standard for intra-AS routing in the Internet. Recently mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have evolved as an irreplaceable networking technology for situations with sparse or nonexistent infrastructure and highly mobile participants. We propose to extend OSPF's capabilities such that it will be able to scale to large MANETs.
  Sponsor:CACC

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• Multihop Relay-Enhanced WiMAX Networks
  The main goal of this project is to quantify the benefits of using relays in WiMAX networks. Topics considered: optimal relay placement, cost effective coverage extension, fairness and scheduling schemes.
  Sponsor: N/A

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• Security Enhancements for Wireless LANs: Localizing the Active Attacker
  On a wired network, physical authentication is implicitly provided by access: if a user is able to plug a cable into a network socket, he must have cleared other security checks such as the receptionist and/or locked doors. In the case of a wireless local area network (WLAN), the signal propagation is not limited by a fixed boundary, and unauthorized access from outside the security perimeter is possible, and in many instances facile. In this project, we use a probabilistic technique for localization of users in a WLAN. The presented technique is able to identify intruders based on their location, and thus successfully defend a parking lot attack. The approach relies on a probabilistic mapping from received signal strength (RSSI) to location.
  Sponsor: N/A