There were people from 40 different countries there and I feel like I met someone from almost every one of them at some point. There were over 300 people at AINA this year, which apparently is down from the last couple of years (where they had 4-500) but it was still a great conference for me. I will post my slides from my presentation in this post in case anyone is interested, along with a link to the paper once it is available. I submitted another paper last night for a conference in Toronto and am working on two more papers, so hopefully I’ll be travelling soon. I am trying to aim for ICC in South Africa next year.

Here are a few pictures from the conference.

Abstract:
This paper addresses the problem of scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). The paper first discusses existing scheduling algorithms and classifies them based on the technique they use and their implementation frameworks.Then detailed discussions of the proposed scheduling method are presented. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare the performance of fair scheduling with the method that does not use fair scheduling. The simulation results confirm that the proposed scheduling method has better performance with respect to the metrics used for performance evaluation.

J.B. Ernst, M.K. Denko, “Fair Scheduling with Multiple Gateways in Wireless Mesh Networks”, in Proc. of the 22nd IEEE Int. Conf. on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2009), Bradford UK, 2009.

The paper itself is available through IEEE Xplore

http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/focusonwireless

(I know this doesn’t benefit me directly since I already belong to those societies and could probably get access to them through my libraries, but they seem interesting enough and I will likely read at least a few the next chance I get). It’s also helpful for those people who don’t necessarily have normal access to IEEE articles a chance to try them out. Topics include Pervasive Computing, Internet Computing, Security, RFIDs and more. Check it out if you get a chance!

On December 2nd and 4th 2008, Research Day for the Computer Science Department at the University of Guelph is taking place. Research Day is a day where many of the graduate and some undergraduate students present research projects in various stages. For the graduate students the projects consist of initial results and proposals for thesis documents while the undergrads present results from their research projects.

I am scheduled so far to present on December 4th at 12:30 – 12:50 pm. Update: I am now scheduled to talk December 8th at 10:00 am – 10:20 am (see below). The topic for my talk is not yet finalized however it will likely be something in the area of fair scheduling in wireless mesh networks with multiple gateways. I will report on my progress thus far in my M.Sc. and give a proposal for my remaining work in the next few months. The plan is to have the first draft of my thesis complete by February, the final draft by March and defend by the end of April.

Check back later for another post with the presentation slides and possibly some pictures from research day at Guelph.

Update: My advisor, Dr. Denko is away at a conference in New Orleans so my talk has been pushed back a couple of days. It will be on December 8th at 10:00 am if you happen to be in Guelph and would like to come and watch me give my talk . Also if you are interested my presentation slides are available at my academic website: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~jernst/research.shtml. Look for the slides on preliminary results. These are also the results I have submitted to the AINA 2009 conference.

Today I completed the listing page for all of the presentations our research group PerWin at the University of Guelph has made in the last year or so. PerWin stands for Pervasive Computing and Wireless Networking Research. The group is directed by my advisor, Dr. Mieso Denko and has several graduate students who are active research members in the group. We have given presentations on topics ranging from Wireless Mesh Networks protocols, Autonomous networks, Fair Scheduling, Load Balancing, RFID, Wireless Security and much more. We have also had special invited talks by several faculty members from various Universities around Ontario (Ryerson, UOIT).

Reynolds Building @ University of Guelph where PerWin meets regularly

Check out the schedule page here for the list of presentations, presenters and topics. There are also listings of many of the websites for the presenters which may be a good resource for people interested in our work. If you are a faculty member interested in giving a talk contact Dr. Mieso Denko at the University of Guelph.

If you are interested in any of the talks I have given, all of the powerpoint presentations are available at my Academic Website at the University of Guelph.

The presentation gave a background on why load balancing and scheduling are important in WMNs. Additionally a survey on the current problems that I find interesting in the area was presented. In case you don’t want to get the presentation / you don’t have MS Office here are the main points from the presentation:

Why is Fair Scheduling Important in WMN:

• Starvation & Unequal Quality of Service (Qos) caused by “greedy” flows or proximity from Gateways which allow other traffic to be ignored or serviced unequally
• In commercial applications of WMNs customers pay equal amounts and expect equal service
• In many solutions that exist today, we cannot have Fairness and Throughput at the same time

Example of a Wireless Mesh Network : netdts.com

Why is Load Balancing Important in WMN:

• Multiple path redundancy is an important trait of WMN however instead of traffic being spread around the multiple links, often the same links become overused and congested while other links are barely used
• Load Balancing tries to solve this problem using at Mesh Routers, Gateways, and sometimes Links to attempt to spread the traffic around the network (although some papers claim that Load Balancing on the links isn’t effective)

Current Problems in Fair Scheduling and Load Balancing in WMN:

• Assumptions in some papers: single hop networks only, limited or no mobility (of the Mesh Routers), fixed topology (Mesh Routers cannot be added or removed and the topology is known at all times)
• Some papers assume that uplink and downlink scheduling can be treated the same when it may be beneficial to treat them independently
• Distributed Vs Centralized Scheduling & Load Balancing
• Future work on many papers cite experimentation with different metrics, optimal locations and number of gateways etc.
• Thorough investigation of load balancing at the gateways, links or mesh routers

If after all this you would still like the presentation, you can download it from the link below:

Download:

Fair Scheduling and Load Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks by Jason Ernst. May 26th 2008.

http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/Opinions/polanyi.shtml

The main message that I like about the article is that being intelligent or talented does not necessarily make you a good researcher but passion is whats necessary to succeed. I think this a very important idea because almost everyone I have met so far in this program has at some time felt very stupid about something they said or did but they still had the determination to keep going. It’s impossible to ever know everything there is to know about a subject so the most important thing to have is passion. You have to want to ask questions and be truly interested in what your doing. It reminds me of a quote my friend in film told me the other day at work, “Its not how talented you are, just how much determination you have”.

I am just happy that I have found my passion in computers and hopefully that I will be able to do research and ask questions about how they work and how to make them work better for the rest of my life. I could spend hours reading articles and papers and still feel like there is not enough time in a day to get it all done. It’s almost funny reading about some of the pioneers in computing and how they were involved in almost every field within computers today from networking to AI to graphics and HCI. Now here I am and I can’t even find enough time to catch up in even one field. I guess thats what the graduate students must be for, to save some time for the prof by telling them in summary about all the best new articles!

Additionally, there are other interesting articles, quotes and opinions collected from the same professor as the above article here by Paul Ward at the University of Waterloo

http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/opinions.shtml