Here are some pictures from the day:

Preparing for the Defense before Everyone Arrives

Some Members of Pervasive Computing and Wireless Network (PerWin) Research Group, University of Guelph

Answering Questions from the Committee at Guelph

After some relaxing, a conference in UK and some business related projects I will finally have some time (hopefully) to update the site with all the projects, articles and source I have been slowly working on the past few months in between working like crazy on my M.Sc. This fall I start my Ph.D. which will likely at least start from the work I just worked on.

As soon as I get the thesis completed though I hope to post alot more new content on the blog (as well as a potential redesign since this one seems a little cluttered and busy to me). Check back soon for alot more in-depth info on using ns3 since that is what I have been using for my thesis experiments lately. Update: I am set to defend on May 18th at Guelph. Let me know if you are interested in attending, I will provide more details via email.

In other news, the University of Guelph has officially accepted me to their Ph.D program to start in the Fall of this year (still under Dr. Denko) so I am pretty excited about having the opportunity to continue my research in Wireless Networks. I am still waiting on responses from a couple of other schools (Waterloo & Calgary) so if I end up getting accepted to either of those I will have quite a decision to make. Update: I have accepted a position at the University of Guelph and will be starting there in the fall of 2009.

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.

An example of a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN)

So why is this technology useful? Well current wireless networks usually depend on one access point as the gateway for all the wireless clients in the network. This approach creates a restrictive bottleneck at the access point. What if we could use multiple access points so that the clients are better spread out. Additionally, instead of having each access point being a gateway, what if only some of them were gateways. The rest can communicate with each other in a mesh structure that allows the data to flow to the gateways. This idea is not new, however there still are no satisfactory ways of doing this. There are many problems to consider which I plan to address in my thesis.

So you may still be wondering where in the real world all of this can be used. Well the obvious answer is in the military. But additionally, this technology could be used in warehouses and factories in place of their current wireless systems for product scanners. Many warehouses use systems that require a wired connection at each access point which in a warehouse can mean expensive wire being run all around needlessly. This new approach would require only a few access points to be hooked into a wired network and the rest of the traffic would flow towards these routers. Similarly, cellular phone companies could use the same technology to reduce the amount of cellular phone towers by configuring each phone as a mesh router. This would allow traffic to reach phones which are further from the existing towers by relaying through phones which are closer. The same technology could be integrated into vehicles allowing for deployment of computer networks along busy highways since access points could be put along the highway. This would allow the access to travel with the moving vehicles as they could route the network traffic towards vehicles which are closer to the access points. So there are plenty of ways this could be used in the real world. It is just a matter now of making it work effectively.

More to come eventually.