IEEE LCN

• 2004

  • LCN 2004 report:

    The 29th IEEE Local Computer Networks (LCN) conference was held in Tampa Florida between 16-18th November, 2004. LCN continued to attract good papers from both academia and industry. This year, LCN received 142 papers submissions from 29 countries. Papers with new ideas were given preference to stimulate discussions during the conference with overall acceptance rate of around 30%.  Papers were organized in three parallel sessions on areas such as peer to peer networks, ad-hoc networks, wireless networks, network security, network management, and high-speed networks. Due to timing constraints for oral presentations, we accepted 25 good quality papers as short papers to be presented during poster sessions.  The poster sessions provided good opportunity for students and young researchers to interact with conference attendees in an informal setting. This year, LCN also attracted two high profile keynote speakers, Prof Hari Balakrishnan from MIT and Prof Raj Jain from Nayna Networks (formerly at Ohio State University). LCN 2004 provided unique opportunity to students belonging to minority groups via NSF travel grant.
    

    In addition to the LCN conference, three focused workshops were also organized one day prior to the main conference. The First IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS-I) was a big success. The EmNetS-I workshop specifically promoted community-wide discussion of how practical considerations, novel applications and real-world experience should shape the design of sensor networks. Professor Daniela Rus provided a thought provoking keynote speech. EmNetS-I topics of interest included:
    

    • Validation or new architectural approaches for sensor networks

    • Tradeoffs between application specific, and modular approaches based on prototyping and implementation

    • Software and architectures for sensor network programmability

    • Approaches to ease deployment and improve manageability of embedded and sensor networks

    • Experimental and measurement tools for sensor networks

    • Reliability and fault-tolerance, debugging and troubleshooting for sensor networks

    • Novel applications for embedded and sensor networks

    • Sensor network security, vulnerabilities and defenses

    • Algorithms, protocols and systems for communication, coordination, data dissemination and storage, sensor tasking and control/actuation

    • Operational experiences from deployed sensor networks and prototypes

    The 4th International Workshop on Wireless Local Networks (WLN) continued this year with very good quality papers. Prof. Dr. Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer from UC Santa Barbara gave a keynote presentation at WLN 2004 in the area of "wireless ad hoc networks". WLN Topics of interest included:
    

    • Wireless LAN and PAN media access techniques and protocols

    • Energy efficiency in protocol and systems design

    • Mobility management in wireless networks

    • User mobility models and workloads

    • Wireless environment simulation modeling

    • Location dependant/personalized wireless applications

    • Security issues in WLANs/WPANs

    • Ad hoc networking

    • Ad hoc routing protocols and algorithms

    • Transport protocols for ad hoc networks

    • Self configuration for ad hoc networks

    • Mobile ad hoc computing platforms and test beds

    • Wireless ad-hoc network simulation techniques

    • Interoperability issues between wireless standards/protocols and the Internet

    • Performance of Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 networks

    • Multiple wireless protocol coexistence issues

    • Quality of Service issues in local wireless networks

    • Wireless multimedia network architectures and protocols

    • Resource allocation in wireless LANs

    The third annual meeting of the IEEE Workshop on High-Speed Local Networks (HSLN) in Tampa, Florida. Dr. Joseph Hellerstein from IBM Research delivered the keynote speech about autonomic computing and research in network management. HSLN topics of interest included: 

    • High-speed LANs (e.g. Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet)

    • System-area networks (e.g. InfiniBand, Myrinet, SCI)

    • Storage-area networks (e.g. Fibre Channel) and I/O interconnects

    • High-speed networks in embedded systems (e.g. avionics, space systems)

    • Protocols, services, and topologies for high-speed local networks

    • Routing and switch architectures for high-speed local networks

    • Quality of Service (QoS) in high-speed local networks

    • Performance analysis of high-speed local networks and systems

    • Modeling and simulation of high-speed local networks

    • Middleware for high-speed local network communication

    • Applications for high-speed local networks (e.g. video on demand)

    The LCN 2004 and workshops received generous support from our industrial and academic supporters, namely University of South Florida, Nokia, Crossbow Technology Inc., National ICT Australia Limited, Smart Internet Technology CRC, Intel, Millennial Net, and Coronis Systems. 

    IEEE Workshop on Wireless Local Networks (WLN) will be held in conjunction with LCN 2005 in Sydney, Australia from 15-17 November 2005

    Plan ahead for LCN 2005 in Sydney, Australia in November 2005! More information about LCN 2005 will be posted here in upcoming months.
    

    
    

IEEE Percom

• 2006

  • Percom 2006 report:

    The fourth International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2006) was held from March 13-17, 2006 at the Conference Center of the Italian Institute of Telematics and Informatics (CNR-IIT) in the famous university town of Pisa, Italy. From the 280 papers submitted, from 35 countries, the technical program committee selected a total of 23 regular papers and 15 short papers for oral presentation.  Overall, there was a strong feeling among all present that this TCCC-sponsored conference has “come of age” and is now easily the premier international conference on the “systems” issues of pervasive and ubiquitous comforting.  

    Before describing some of the program highlights, two very important and encouraging aspects of the growth of Percom must be mentioned. First, one must highlight the international nature of the community involvement, as evidenced by the submissions and presentations, with the US contributing ~22% of the papers, and an emerging country like China contributing ~11% of the submitted papers. Percom has proven to be particularly successful in engaging the research and technical committees of both Europe and Asia-Pacific, reflecting the fact that both regions are engaged in active research on several cutting-edge topics, such as smart environments integrating RFID and sensor networks, immersive reality and novel pervasive user interfaces. Second, Percom 2006 provided a perfect balance between theoretical enhancements and practical technology demonstrations—indeed, the conference had a very successful and popular demonstration session that vividly showed how network connectivity is transforming user interaction with devices in everyday “work” and “consumer” environments. 

    Percom 2006 comprised eight plenary sessions for regular papers, and four parallel sessions for short papers. Particular mention must be made of the three best paper candidates that illustrated the broad impact of pervasive technologies in both our work and home environments. The Mark Weiser Best paper award was given to the paper titled “Context-Aware Resource Management in Multi-Inhabitant Smart Homes: A Nash H-Learning Based Approach” by N. Roy, A. Roy, and S. K. Das from the University of Texas at Arlington. This paper is one of the first to consider the practical challenges of location prediction in a smart home with multiple inhabitants, where individuals may have different goals and movement/activity patterns. The authors use a Nash-H based game theoretic approach to efficiently maximize location predictability, thus leading to more effective use of resources in future homes. Another paper that caught the attention of delegates and that received the “Best Impact” award was “Is Your Cat Infected by a Computer Virus?” by M. R. Rieback, B. Crispo, and A. S. Tanenbaum from Vrije Universitiet. This paper is the first to demonstrate that even small amounts of data stored in RFID tags can contain “viruses” and be used to compromise the security of RFID-based infrastructures. This paper can be expected to impact of the design of RFID infrastructures and was cited by articles in the popular press, including BBC News and Computer Business Review. Another candidate for best paper award, titled “Mapping Human Networks” by J. Gips and A. Pentland demonstrated how contactless “smart badges” can be used to measure and analyze human ‘social interaction’ at conferences and trade shows. In addition to these papers, the conference feature research presentations on a variety of topics, including novel user interfaces for wearable devices, novel browsing and context-aware data retrieval systems and easily-programmable software architectures for pervasive environments.

    Another notable component of the main program were the two keynote speeches. The keynote speech “When the Sensors Hit the Road: Challenges in Mobile Sensor Computing” by Prof. Hari Balakrishnan (MIT) highlighted crucial challenges in the practical deployment of sensor networks, while the speech  “Future Trends in WirelessTechnology and the Path to Pervasive Computing” by Prof. Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers University) provided a roadmap on how cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum allocation technologies could enable co-existence among a variety of devices and standards in a future converged environment. 

    As already stated, the demonstration session at Percom 2006 was especially noteworthy and attracted very high interest from the attendees. Among the many high quality demonstrations were one from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, showing how RFID and Bluetooth technology could be used to personalize the settings on a commercial espresso machine autonomously and one from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, showing how simple gestures could be used to provide an intuitive interface to a wearable computer. The best demonstration award was presented to the team from Samsung Information Systems who showed how middleware components could be used to seamlessly unify a user’s activity and interaction across multiple mobile platforms.

    Percom 2006 was also notable for its set of nine day long workshops, which proved very successful in stimulating focused exchange of ideas on specific niche research areas. Two of the workshops, 1st Workshop on Ubiquitous and Pervasive Health Care (Ubicare) and the Workshop on Pervasive Computing and Communication Security (Persec) were especially well-attended, and attest to the growing interest of pervasive technologies in the healthcare domain and the security and privacy challenges encountered in pervasive environments. Looking forward, I expect these domains and themes to be of growing importance to the professional community.

    Next year, the 5^th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications will be held in New York City, USA on March 26-30, 2006. Look for this conference to continue to be the premier venue for advances in wireless networks, mobile computing, sensor networks, distributed computing, and agent technologies!

    
    

IEEE WoWMoM

• 2007

  • The IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM) has seen, this year, its 8^th edition. The event, held in Helsinki during June 18-21 2007, has confirmed once more its success and its capability to attract researchers, practitioners and students of the technology evolution underlying mobile multimedia communications. Out of 154 submitted papers, the technical organization committee selected 15 extended papers, 32 regular papers and 12 poster presentations for inclusion in a high quality technical program.

     

    The papers were organized in 13 technical sessions covering a variety of hot topic areas underlying mobile multimedia communication, and ranging from resource management and network control & engineering to multimedia mobile applications. It is interesting to note that the conference has accommodated a very well balanced mix among sharp and punctual technical contributions in somewhat consolidated research areas (e.g., cross-layer optimization, MAC, routing, monitoring, etc.) and technologies which have already witnessed a significant deployment (such as WLANs, cellular systems, Mesh Networks, etc.), and explorative/provocative contributions in newer or emerging areas (sensor networks, opportunistic networks, pervasive systems, etc.). The technical program has further confirmed the growing interest of the wireless research community in security (with one dedicated full session plus a few additional papers for convenience distributed in other thematic sessions), and in the software-rich middleware and application domain. As a curiosity (and perhaps a research trend indication), multi-rate wireless networks and multicast/broadcast approaches, i.e., two technical topics which are typically included in more general-purpose or technology-oriented sessions, were sufficiently crowded to permit to dedicate a full session to each of them.

     

    A novelty in the 8^th edition of WoWMoM was the inclusion, in the main program, of two additional tracks: a demo session and an industry track. These tracks were clearly distinguished from the main event (with separate calls for papers and different technical program committees) and, as such, strongly focused. 4 demonstrations were selected and presented in a dedicated session, while 11 contributions (out of approx. 20 submissions) were included in a three-session industry-track program. The success of the industry session (initially unforeseen – and in fact a third session was deemed necessary in addition to the two originally planned) was indeed remarkable. It suggests us to follow up with such initiative in future WoWMoM events, as a concrete means to close the gap between theoretical and visionary insights and applied research, prototyping, and experiences of clear industry relevance.

     

    During an exciting conference banquet in the beautiful and historic fortified island of Kustaanmiekka, two awards were given. The first to the best conference paper (Integrated Access Point Placement and Channel Assignment for Wireless LANs in an Indoor Office Environment, authored by Andreas Eisenblatter, Hans-Florian Geerdes and Iana Siomina), selected by the TPC across the 8 candidates with the highest review scores, and the second to the best demonstration (Real-time Network Simulation of 3GPP Long Term Evolution, provided by Ingo Viering, Christian Buchner, Eiko Seidel and Axel Klein), voted by the organization committee after the demonstration session.

     

    The technical program was complemented by three extremely well received keynote speeches, namely, i) "The Home as The Future for Wireless Infrastructure," given by Jan Rabaey, University of California, Berkeley, ii)  "Wireless Technologies for Local Interaction," given by Mauri Honkanen, Nokia Research Center, and iii) "Addressing the Challenges of Complex Networks Research," given by Paul Losiewicz, AFRL  European Office of Research and Development, as well as a stimulating panel, “Multimedia in  Wireless/Mobile Networks –  Applications & Challenges,” moderated by Kumar Ramaswamy, Thomson, Inc. and involving as panelists Laurent Roul (Technical Product Manager- MobileTV, Thomson, Inc., France), Anand Prasad (Project Manager, Network Security, DoCoMo Euro-Labs, Germany) and Matt Ward-Steinman (Director, Product Development, Medio, Inc., USA). Finally, a descriptive talk from Fabrizio Sestini was further included in the program, addressing the Future Internet Research Initiatives recently launched in the EU and discussing its relation with similar initiatives outside the EU.

     

    IEEE WoWMoM 2007 was co-located with a set of six very successful workshops, covering themes related to “autonomic and opportunistic communications”, “autonomic wireless access”, “experimental evaluation of wireless networks”, “trust and privacy in pervasive environments”, “adaptive and dependable mission/business-critical mobile systems”, “theory and practice in wireless sensor networks”. Each of these workshops attracted a focused and lively audience and generated significant discussion and debate on emerging research trends in specific niche areas.

     

    Next year, the 9^th edition of IEEE WoWMoM will be held in Newport Beach / Irvine, California (USA), during June 23-27, 2008. Look forward to everyone’s participation in this exciting conference!

    
    
• 2006

  • CONFERENCE REPORT: IEEE WoWMoM 2006

    Archan Misra, IBM Research

     

    The 7th International Symposium n a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM 2006) was held from June 26-29, 2006 at the lovely border town of Niagara Falls, USA. From the approx 140 papers submitted, the technical program consisted of 15 technical sessions, consisting of 15 extended papers, 32 regular papers and 11 poster presentations.  Two of the more prominent themes emerging from the conference technical track were a) the importance of multimedia traffic management (including rate control and cross-layer optimizations) for a variety of wireless applications and b) the heightened importance of security (included intrusion detection, location hiding etc.) for sensor-network based applications. Interestingly enough, the support of a combination of interactive and broadcast multimedia traffic seems to be the main technical challenge for emerging cellular and mesh network architectures—several papers highlighted the enhancements that would need to be at the MAC and routing layers. There was also significant audience interest in several well-known problems related to sensor networks, with a noticeable trend towards research in various “middleware” aspects of sensor networks (besides the traditional focus on MAC and routing layer issues).

     

    Some of the interesting papers at the conference included “Entrapping Adversaries for Source Protection in Sensor Networks” by Y. Ouyang. et al (which describes a technique for inserting low-latency loops in the data delivery path to shield the location of a source sensor from an eavesdropping adversary), “Mobile Element Based Differentiated Message Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks” by Y. Gu, D. Bozdag and E. Ekici (which describes how the travel schedule of mobile elements or data mules can be orchestrated to address differential QoS tolerances in the generated data), “Some Insights from Bounds on UWB Sensor Localization” by S. Venkatesh and M. Buehrer (which relates the accuracy of localization to enhancements at the MAC layer to permit high throughput of packets containing range estimates) and “An Energy-Efficient Forwarding Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks” by M. Busse, T. Haensselman and W. Effelsberg (which shows how a new multi-link data forwarding approach, where a single transmission reaches multiple receivers, can improve the energy efficiency and lifetime of sensor networks).

     

    The conference program included two, extremely well-received, keynote speeches. The first keynote speech titled “Multimedia Content on Mobile Devices: Opportunities and Challenges” by Dr. Kumar Ramaswamy (VP, Corporate Research,Thomson) focused on the challenges and issues related to multimedia delivery by cellular providers in a converged network provider. Dr. Ramaswamy highlighted the importance of the increasingly popularity on broadcast multimedia interactions (e.g., mobile TV via technologies such as DVB), and argued that interactive multimedia traffic would emerge as a value-added service over the basic broadcast traffic, presenting several challenges for integrated signaling, service creation and service management. The second keynote speech titled “Networking in a Heterogeneous, Intermittent World” by Dr. Kevin Fall (Principal Engineer, Intel Research) presented a fascinating overview of the emergence of delay, mobility and disconnection tolerant applications as a new paradigm of communication in a variety of scenarios. His talk highlighted how DTN scenarios resulted in new research challenges in both protocol modification and application design, and also presented newly emerging research on the applicability of DTN techniques to underwater marine networks.  In addition, WoWMoM 2006 also featured a very lively panel discussion on “Integrated Optical and Wireless Technologies for Broadband Access and Metro Networks”, which highlighted how advances in broadband amplifiers and other technologies could lead to tighter integration between a fiber-wired backbone and a wireless-based metro access network.

    WoWMoM 2006 was collocated with a set of five very successful workshops, including themes related to “autonomic communications” “experimental evaluation of wireless networks”, “distributed computing techniques in mobile applications”, “middleware components for sensor networks” and “trust and privacy in pervasive environments”. Each of these workshops attracted a focused and lively audience and generated significant discussion and debate on emerging research trends in specific niche areas.

    Next year, the 8^th edition of IEEE WoWMoM will be held in Helsinki, Finland on June18-21, 2007. Look forward to everyone’s participation in this conference!

     

    
    
• 2005

  • WoWMoM 2005 report:

    The sixth IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WOWMOM 2005) was held at the Russot Ramada Hotel in the lovely resort town of Giardini-Naxos in Sicily. From the 180 papers submitted, from 31 countries, the technical program committee selected a total of 57 full papers for oral presentation and 20 additional submissions for poster presentation. In addition, the conference comprised two workshops, two keynote speeches and one panel discussion. Around 120 participants from all over the globe attended WOWMOM 2005. 

    One of the highlights of the conference was the keynote speeches, provided a review of research advances and challenges in sensor networks and wireless network management. Prof. Adam Woliscz from the Technical University of Berlin delivered a keynote talk titled “Sensor Networks: A Hype or Real Challenge?” He first listed out the major advances in radio and processor technology, including reduced (~1MW) radio power consumption, that are likely to make one-dollar sensor devices a reality within the next 5-10 years. However, he highlighted how significant research is still needed to allow sensor devices to be addressed and queried using data-centric or descriptive mechanisms. One major challenge of such abstractions was that, while such abstractions made rapid application development easier, higher-level abstractions tended to be less energy-efficient.  Dr. Sudhir Dixit from Nokia Network Research Center delivered the other keynote titled “Designing Self Organized Wireless Networks—Is it Possible?” He started out by explaining how the gradual adoption of IPv6 and the extension of the Internet to include home appliances, sensors etc., were likely to change the topological properties of the Internet. He described how “small-world” and “scale-free” models describe the topological properties of the conventional wired Internet, and then explained the challenges of applying such models for wireless ad-hoc networks due to the typical physical limits on the size of a wireless link. Through an example of a relay-based access network, he then explained how how scale-free principles could be used to derived both the topological properties and routing mechanisms in wireless networks as well.

    The main conference also featured an exciting panel on “The Future Wireless Networks: Managed vs. Decentralized?”, moderated by Milind Buddhikot from Lucent Bell Labs, and featuring 4 eminent panelists. Sunghyun Choi from Seoul National University mentioned that wide-area “3G” service itself was unlikely to be replaced solely by WLAN-based access, especially as fixed physical-layer wireless relays were being increasingly used by cellular providers to extend coverage to more difficult environments, such as large buildings and subways. Adam Woliscz opined that cellular networks were likely to evolve to a hybrid architecture, whereby nodes with poor connectivity to the base station would hop across other available cellular nodes using a secondary local area interface, thereby improving the use of the wide-area spectrum. Giuseppe Bianchi of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” discussed his belief that the infrastructure cellular provider would survive, but would instead be complemented by additional “managed” WLAN networks that would use emerging techniques such as multiple antennas (for spatial diversity) to further improve the available WLAN bandwidth to 1Gbps and beyond. Igor Curcio from Nokia described his opinion that the real challenge to a WLAN/mesh-based architecture wasn’t the networks themselves, but the additional development cost associated with making 3G-based applications compatible to this mixed environment. In addition, audience members raised the point that the charging models for a mixed WWAN/WLAN environment needed to be developed before providers embraced such a hybrid architecture.

    WOWMOM 2005  comprised fourteen regular sessions, covering a wide variety of topics including 802.11 MAC enhancements, energy-efficient computing in ad-hoc and sensor environments, application-layer adaptation and service composition for wireless multimedia services, and performance evaluation of both WLAN and mesh network testbeds. Some highlights include: Nicholas Bauer, et al from the Colorado School of Mines described a new approach for maintaining and exchanging global information in an ad-hoc network using a circulating “legend” packet that makes a random walk through the network; Ilenia Tinnirello, et al presented two papers on new methods of congestion window control and RTS/CTS signaling for fairness and better utilization in multi-rate 802.11-based WLANs; Paolo Bellavista, et al from the University of Bologna described their REDMAN middleware for efficient replication of read-only objects among central nodes in an ad-hoc network; Samir Das et al from SUNY Stonybrook described a new anycast extension of 802.11 that enables the link layer to forward packets along potentially many multiple routes; thereby increasing the probability of successful delivery; Milind Buddhikot et al from Bell Labs presented a position paper arguing for DIMSUMNet, an architecture for market-driven spectrum utilization (especially important since studies have demonstrated that over 60% of spectrum often goes unutilized in practice!!) that employs a regional-broker approach and defines a new band where spectrum is leased only for relatively short durations. Overall, two main themes of research seemed to be dominant (and perhaps reflect the current research focus of the academic and industrial research communities): a) new architectures and channel allocation policies for multi-radio mesh networks, and b) service and transport-layer adaptation techniques for supporting multimedia applications in wireless networks.

    WOWMOM 2005 also organized two very interesting, well-attended and focused 1-day workshops.  The Autonomic Communications and Computing Workshop (ACC) presented research ideas on how networks could become self-managing, thus reducing their maintenance complexity. ACC received 33 submissions from all five continents, and the program included 12 papers and an  exciting panel (details available at  http://www.autonomic-communication.org/acc/program/ACC05-panel-report-final.pdf.) The Workshop on Trust, Security and Privacy for Ubiquitous Computing (TSPUC) addressed issues related to privacy management and trusted computing in decentralized, emerging environments, such as ad-hoc and sensor networks. The workshop program included 10 papers (selected from 48 submissions), a keynote speech and a panel.  The topics addressed during the workshop covered a wide range of topics from privacy policy to group key agreement in peer-to-peer networks and hybrid key establishment in sensor networks.

    Next year, the 7th IEEE on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WOWMOM 2005) will be held in Niagara Falls/Buffalo, New York, USA on June 26-29, 2006. Be sure to attend WOWMOM 2006 as it continues to provide a high-profile forum for researchers and engineers on exciting advances in the area of pervasive and wireless multimedia!!

    
    

IEEE ICNP

• 2006
  • Coming Soon