Wireless Networks and Pervasive Services Technologies: Fundamentals and Recent Advances
Lecturer:
Dr. Kun Yang (University of Essex, UK.)
Abstract:
As wireless broadband networks become increasingly mobile and ubiquitous, users naturally require the services running on top of these networks to become pervasive, i.e., to be able to run anywhere, at any time and on any devices without or with little user intervention. Apart from presenting state-of-the-art fundamentals of these two inter-connected and active research areas, namely, wireless networks and pervasive services, this lecture series will also discuss new solutions as arising from the lecturer's research group, aiming to giving a balanced overall view of the recent advances of the broad research area of wireless networks and pervasive services. The primary topics include: fundamentals of computer networks and wireless networks; individual wireless network technologies covering WiFi, WiMAX, cellular systems, wireless sensor networks; network convergence including heterogeneous wireless networks and the convergence of wireless (WiMAX) with fixed optical networks (PON: Passive Optical Networks); various enabling technologies for pervasive computing; and pervasive service engineering.
Short Bio of the Lecturer:
Dr. Kun Yang received his PhD from the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, University College London (UCL), UK. He is currently a Reader in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK. Before joining in University of Essex at 2003, he worked at UCL on several European Union research projects, such as MANTRIP, FAIN, CONTEXT. His main research interests include wireless networks, heterogeneous wireless networks, fixed mobile convergence, IP network management and pervasive service engineering. He has published 100+ technical papers in mainstream journals and major international conferences. He manages research projects funded by various sources such as UK research funding body EPSRC, industries such as British Telecom, and European Union. He is a recipient of British Telecom Visiting Research Fellowship 2007. He serves on the editorial boards of both IEEE and non-IEEE journals (such as Wiley Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Springer Telecommunication Systems, alongside other four). He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
Place:
National Institute of Informatics, 20F, meeting room
This lecture firstly gives a snapshot of computer network fundamentals, including basic concepts such as protocols, services, addressing, different view of network infrastructure, and the whole procedure of end-to-end package transmission. Then, the lecture goes on to present wireless communication/network preliminaries, comprising physical layer multiplexing, signal and noise, BER (bit error rate), media access control, etc. A panorama view of the mainstream wireless network technologies will also be illustrated, covering cellular systems, WiFi (IEEE 802.11), WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) together with mobile ad hoc networks, mesh networks and wireless sensor networks. Mobility issues in wireless networks, largely based on IEEE 802.21 MIH (Media Independent Handover), will also be discussed about. Some relevant recent research areas such as cognitive radio.
This lecture aims to providing a deeper look into two wireless technologies: WiMAX and B3G mobile cellular systems. The physical layer, MAC (Media Access Control) layer, QoS (Quality of Service) and scheduling of WiMAX standards will be presented, in close comparison with WiFi. Mobile cellular system part will cover 3G system infrastructure (using UMTS as an example), its development into 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE). A comparison between WiMAX and LTE, which represent wider area wireless broadband solution from IT companies and traditional telco companies respectively, will be conducted. Some emerging technologies such as femto cell etc will also be discussed.
This lecture tunes into the application of wireless network technologies to particular domain: vehicular communications. Much work has been conducted to provide a common platform facilitating inter-vehicle communications or intelligent transportation systems largely utilizing IEEE 802.11-based technology such as WAVE (Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment). This talk explores another means to enable vehicular networks, namely, IEEE 802.16 or WiMAX, with particular focus on another type of vehicular network service: the Internet access from mobile vehicles on highways. A description of how the system operates will be presented. A particular handover scheme in the context of the newly published IEEE 802.16j will also be delivered.
This lecture looks into network convergence, including both the convergence of different wireless network technologies and the convergence of wireless mobile networks with fixed networks such as passive optical networks (PON). The wireless convergence part presents how IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks can be introduced into cellular networks to improve the overall performance of the latter both in terms of voice calls and data services. The fixed mobile convergence (FMC) part introduces how to use PONs (in particular Ethernet PONs) to backhaul wireless network traffics. Going beyond the conventional way of optical wireless convergence such as radio over fibre (RoF), this lecture is to investigate into a joint bandwidth allocation algorithm between WiMAX and EPON, which lies at the MAC layer and serves as an alternative to RoF. Some experimental results on Essex test-bed are shown.
Following an introductory presentation of the architecture, the protocol stack and major research issues of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), this lecture focuses on topology control and power assignment problems in WSNs and presents how modern heuristics such as genetic algorithms and local search, after being flavoured with network specific flavours, can be utilized to solve these problems in an offline manner at sensor deployment stage. A TDMA-based media access control will also be presented.
This lecture starts with an illustration of the evolution of computing from mainframe through client-server (including peer-to-peer) to pervasive computing. Following discussions on research areas of pervasive computing, the lecture zooms in to some fundamental technologies to help build pervasive computing systems. These are grouped into three categories: 1) web-based such as extending web beyond HTML ? content/XML, extending web beyond HTTP - processing, and web services; 2) distributed object technologies such as Sun Java RMI and OMG CORBA, and 3) active code migration technologies such as active/programmable networks, mobile agents. Instead of presenting the details of every single technology, this lecture focuses on discussions on the relationships and evolution of these technologies in the context of developing adaptive and pervasive systems.
This lecture looks into an active branch of pervasive computing, pervasive services. Here a pervasive service is a piece of adaptive service that has the ability to run anywhere, at any time and potentially on any device. It starts with introduction of some basic concepts and principles of pervasive service engineering such as context-awareness, and then it proceeds to focus on one stage of the lifecycle of pervasive service engineering: service creation, which is an area that is largely neglected when providing service adaptability due to its static nature. An alternative approach to the existing literature is discussed, which advocates a shift of focus from comprehensive and complex middleware supporting environment for pervasive services, which is outside of pervasive services themselves, to the internal logic of pervasive services. In this approach, a combination of policy-based management method and model-driven architecture (MDA) is proposed for service creation. Presentation on how this approach makes positive impact on service discovery, which is a stage necessary for run-time service composition and service adaptation, is also given. Deployment issues as to how to run pervasive services on resource-constrained mobile devices are also discussed and corresponding solutions proposed.
