The goal of Our Lab.

Our research topics aim at developing and evaluating wireless communication protocols and distributed network algorithms. The current research interests include, but are not limited to

Broadband Wireless Communications: 3G networks and beyond, LTE/LTE-A, WiMAX.

Mobile and Pervasive Computing: MANET, vehicular networks, wireless network integration.

Sensor and Actuator Networks: Communication protocols, data aggregation, mobile sensors, coverage and deployment,real-life applications.

Wireless LANs and PANs: Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee.

Software-Defined Networking: Openflow, Ryu, network control and management.

LTE (Long-term evolution)

LTE, an initialism of long-term evolution, marketed as 4G LTE, is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. It is based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA network technologies, increasing the capacity and speed using a different radio interface together with core network improvements. The standard is developed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) and is specified in its Release 8 document series, with minor enhancements described in Release 9.

The world's first publicly available LTE service was launched by TeliaSonera in Oslo and Stockholm on December 14 2009. LTE is the natural upgrade path for carriers with both GSM/UMTS networks and CDMA networks such as Verizon Wireless, who launched the first large-scale LTE network in North America in 2010,and au by KDDI in Japan have announced they will migrate to LTE. LTE is, therefore, anticipated to become the first truly global mobile phone standard, although the different LTE frequencies and bands used in different countries will mean that only multi-band phones will be able to use LTE in all countries where it is supported.

Although marketed as a 4G wireless service, LTE (as specified in the 3GPP Release 8 and 9 document series) does not satisfy the technical requirements the 3GPP consortium has adopted for its new standard generation, and which were originally set forth by the ITU-R organization in its IMT-Advanced specification. However, due to marketing pressures and the significant advancements that WIMAX, HSPA+ and LTE bring to the original 3G technologies, ITU later decided that LTE together with the aforementioned technologies can be called 4G technologies. The LTE Advanced standard formally satisfies the ITU-R requirements to be considered IMT-Advanced. And to differentiate LTE-Advanced and WiMAX-Advanced from current 4G technologies, ITU has defined them as "True 4G".

WSN (Wireless Sensor Network)

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, pressure, etc. and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location. The more modern networks are bi-directional, also enabling control of sensor activity. The development of wireless sensor networks was motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance; today such networks are used in many industrial and consumer applications, such as industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, and so on.

The WSN is built of "nodes" – from a few to several hundreds or even thousands, where each node is connected to one (or sometimes several) sensors. Each such sensor network node has typically several parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or connection to an external antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing with the sensors and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded form of energy harvesting. A sensor node might vary in size from that of a shoebox down to the size of a grain of dust, although functioning "motes" of genuine microscopic dimensions have yet to be created.

The cost of sensor nodes is similarly variable, ranging from a few to hundreds of dollars, depending on the complexity of the individual sensor nodes. Size and cost constraints on sensor nodes result in corresponding constraints on resources such as energy, memory, computational speed and communications bandwidth. The topology of the WSNs can vary from a simple star network to an advanced multi-hop wireless mesh network. The propagation technique between the hops of the network can be routing or flooding.

SDN (Software-Defined Networking)

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing than traditional network management.SDN is meant to address the fact that the static architecture of traditional networks is decentralized and complex while current networks require more flexibility and easy troubleshooting.

SDN attempts to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets (data plane) from the routing process (control plane). The control plane consists of one or more controllers, which are considered the brain of the SDN network where the whole intelligence is incorporated. However, the intelligent centralization has its own drawbacks when it comes to security, scalability and elasticity and this is the main issue of SDN.