When you stand at a point of your university campus your multi-mode smart phone is likely to be exposed to multiple wireless network signals: 2.75G (EDGE), 3G WCDMA from DoCoMo, various WiFi access points (IEEE 802.11g or the most recent 802.11n) provided by KDDI/your university/your department/your research group, and even WiMAX and/or DVB-H if your department has a research group that is into this area of research, in addition to the normal GPS, Bluetooth. We live in a world of many different types of wireless access networks. There will be no perfect wireless system in terms of various factors such as mobility, capacity, coverage, and cost. Instead, these networks, each with its unique features, will co-exist. Technologies that enable users to seamlessly and easily use these networks are needed. For instance, one immediate question would be which wireless network I shall select in this scenario. This series of lectures aim to cast some discussing light on the research issues arising from such a heterogeneous environment from both network and service's perspectives. This convergence lies in both access and core networks. On top of brief introductions of related background knowledge, the talks will be centred around the presentation and discussions of some of the research outcomes of Future Network research lab. Apart from serving their educational and knowledge transfer purposes, the talks also aims to encouraging and inviting discussions on future collaborations, especially on some futuristic and emerging topics such as mobile social networks (and in particular vehicular social networks), network virtualization, etc.
Lecturer:
Kun Yang (Reader, Department of Computing and Electronics Systems, University of Essex)
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 & network virtualization, 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). He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
The last few years have witnessed a rapid growth of both fixed broadband technologies such as passive optical networks (PONs) and wireless mobile network technologies. Wireless networks particularly demonstrate their diversity with many co-existing solutions such as WiFi, WiMAX, 3G, LTE (long-term evolution), 4G, etc. The convergence of these two complementary technologies offers both the bandwidth benefit of optical networks and the mobility advantage of wireless networks. This lecture is to look into the current literature and research challenges in these kinds of converged networks, together with presentation of some of the research outcomes produced in University of Essex.
While Lecture 1 presents network & service convergence from a more theoretical perspective, this Lecture is to look into its practical aspect. This talk will present a comprehensive research environment at Essex for researches on fixed mobile convergence (FMC). This FMC environment constitutes an FMC test-bed for proof-of-the-concept experiments on real network devices and an FMC simulator for large-scale network evaluation in a more open environment. Some use cases will also be presented and discussed.
Social Networks have attracted billions of active users under major online social network systems such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These systems allow people with common interests to come together and form virtual communities. Nowadays these social networks are increasingly used on mobile devices thus rendering a new research field of mobile social networks, which is regarded in this paper as a marriage of the traditional wired-network-based social networks such as Facebook with mobile wireless networks. Starting with a new definition for mobile social network, this lecture is to explore the architecture, new research challenges and open problems of this young research field. A socially-aware mobility model is to be presented, which is to be utilized in a delay-tolerant ad hoc network. The lecture will also narrow mobile social networks down to a particular application domain, i.e., vehicular networks, to present some of our preliminary exploration on how social centrality, an important concept in social network analysis, makes impact on dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) in a specific scenario of vehicular social networks.
Virtualization exists practically in every aspect of computing, for instance, an operating system is a virtualization of bare computer hardware whereas a data centre is a virtualization of a group of physical resources such as storage, CPU and the software toolkits operating on top of these resources. Amid the current trend of various virtualizations as typically represented by cloud computing such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), System as a Service (SaaS), etc, network virtualization (e.g., Network as a Service: NaaS) stands at a unique point in the current virtualization (XaaS) wave. Starting with a briefing of XaaS, this lecture embarks on a unique angel of the bridging and integration of two schools of virtualizations: network virtualization and IT resource virtualization. In addition to presenting an integrated platform for the convergence of these two types of virtualizations, each of interest to different stakeholders, and its research challenges, the talk will present a technical plan to approach it. The interaction of Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), which is mainly for IT resource virtualization, with more network-minded OpenFlow from Stanford, will also be described.
