Professor Mario Gerla

Fellow, IEEE

UCLA

Mario Gerla received a graduate degree in engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from UCLA in 1970 and 1973, respectively. After working for Network Analysis Corporation from 1973 to 1976, he joined the Faculty of the Computer Science Department at UCLA where he is now Professor. His research interests cover the performance evaluation, design and control of distributed computer communication systems; high speed computer networks; wireless LANs, and;ad hoc wireless networks. He has worked on the design, implementation and testing of various wireless ad hoc network protocols (channel access, clustering, routing and transport) within the DARPA WAMIS, GloMo projects. Currently he is leading the ONR MINUTEMAN project at UCLA, and is designing a robust, scalable wireless ad hoc network architecture for unmanned intelligent agents in defense and homeland security scenarios. He is also conducting research on QoS routing, multicasting protocols and TCP transport for the Next Generation Internet (see www.cs.ucla.edu/NRL for recent publications). He became IEEE Fellow in 2002.

Abstract

In traditional pervasive computing applications, the individual interacts with a highly instrumented environment and “unconsciously” connects with the various sensors embedded in the environment to extract important information. In fact, the “constellation” of devices that the individual carries on himself spontaneously “computes” in a “pervasive” way several metrics that could be of interest to its master. An example is the traveler that in the airport hurries towards the gate and is informed of last minute announcements, or, the vehicle in an “intelligent” highway that picks up navigation safety information from the curb.

A new trend has emerged recently, which basically turns the tables around. Individuals now carry a number of sensing devices (video cameras, acoustic recorders, etc). In the future they may carry even more, for example radiation sensors, etc. The same can be said for cars, which carry video cameras, GPS and also various other types of sensors. The model now is no longer the mobile user that unconsciously extracts information form the environment. Rather, it is the environment (specifically, a few well placed access point in the urban mesh network, say) that continuously probes passing pedestrians and cars, in order to extract useful information. More generally, the environment has been extended to include mobile sensor platforms, which now are becoming a valuable source of “pervasive” information.

This new mobile sensor and information platform model poses very interesting challenges. In this talk we will focus on cars in the urban grid as distributed platforms, and will address the problem of accessing the massive information that has been collected and is available in the car sensor fabric. Two approaches will be discussed. The first approach is for each car to “diffuse” the information it collected to all the other cars in the neighborhood using the “Epidemic Dissemination” method. Another approach is to maintain a distributed index (say, implemented with Distributed Hash Tables) that allows to track the desired content as well as the location of the vehicle that stores it. We will report on our experience with Ad Torrent (a scheme for disseminating advertisements to cars). We will discuss the two schemes and comment on their relative merits.

Professor Khaled Ben Letaief

Fellow, IEEE

Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

Chair Professor and Head

EEE Department, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Professor Letaief received the Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University , USA in 1990. From 1990 to 1993, he was a faculty member at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Since 1993, he has been with HKUST where he is a Chair Professor and Head of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department. He is also the Director of the Hong Kong Telec om Insti tute of Information Technology as well as the Director of the Center for Wireless Information Technology.

Dr. Letaief is an acknowledged authority in the area of wireless and mobile communications including broadband wireless data access, wideband CDMA, MIMO systems, OFDM, Cross-layer design, and beyond 3G systems. In these areas, he has published over 280 journal and conference papers and given invited talks as well as courses all over the world. He served as consultants for different organizations and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications . He also served on the editorial board of other journals including the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications ( as Editor-in-Chief ). Professor Letaief has been involved in organizing a number of major international conferences and events. He also served as the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Personal Communications as well as a member of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Activity Council.

In addition to his active research activities, Professor Letaief has also been a dedicated teacher committed to excellence in teaching and scholarship. He received the Mangoon Teaching Award from Purdue University in 1990; the Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award by the School of Engineering at HKUST (4 times); and the Michael G. Gale Medal for Distinguished Teaching ( Highest university-wide teaching award ).

He is a Fellow of IEEE, an elected member of the IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors, and an IEEE Distinguished lecturer.

Abstract

Over the past decade, wireless communications has seen an exponential growth and will certainly continue to witness spectacular developments due to the emergence of new interactive multimedia applications and highly integrated systems driven by the rapid growth in information services and microelectronic devices. So far, most of the current mobile systems are mainly targeted to voice communications with low transmission rates. In the near future, however, broadband data access at high transmission rates will be needed to provide users packet-based connectivity to a plethora of services. It is also almost certain that the neXt Generation (XG) wireless systems will consist of complementary systems with a set of different standards and technologies along with different requirements and complementary capabilities that will offer users ubiquitous wireless connectivity between mobile and desktop computers, machines, game systems, cellular phones, consumer electronic products, and other hand-held devices. A key requirement in future wireless systems is their ability to provide broadband connectivity with end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS), a high network capacity, and throughput at a low cost. To support the above services, a host of new issues and problems have to be addressed. This talk will discuss the challenges facing the XG ubiquitous broadband systems and then describe some of the leading enabling technologies for increasing system capacity and spectral efficiency while mitigating the detrimental effects of the mobile environment and meeting the stringent requirements of future networks.

Dr Hajime Nakamura

Communications Network Planning Laboratory

KDDI R&D Laboratories, Inc.

Hajime Nakamura received B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Waseda University, Tokyo in 1988, 1990, and 2002, respectively. He joined the Research and Development Laboratories of Kokusai Denshin Denwa Company Ltd. (currently KDDI) in 1990, and has engaged in research on communications network design and planning. His current research interests include the architecture of next-generation telecommunication networks. He attends at the ITU-R WP8F meeting and is a chair of Service Sub-Working Group. He is currently a senior manager of the Communications Network Planning Laboratory of KDDI R&D Laboratories, Inc. He received the Young Engineer Award of the IEICE in 1996 and Best Paper Awards of the IEICE in 1998 and 2002.

Abstract

Wireless access technology to connect ubiquitous terminals is one of essential fields to pervasive computing. As major current wireless access systems, cellular and wireless LAN systems are widely deployed and are making their way into our daily life. They are experiencing rapid evolution on a global scale and will affect future environment for the pervasive computing. I will introduce a vision for the future wireless access systems including trend of standardization activity, deployment scenarios, expected applications and so forth. Regarding the standardization activity, ITU (International Telecommunication Union) published ITU-R Recommendation M.1645 “A framework for the future development of IMT-2000 and systems beyond IMT-2000”. The recommendation includes a framework that future wireless access will be realized as convergence of multiple various systems such as cellular, wireless LAN, short-range connectivity and broadcasting. Based on the framework, KDDI provided 'Ultra-3G' next-generation communications infrastructure plan. This plan shows a creation of fixed and mobile convergence that encompasses current 3G mobile phones, wireless LAN, IEEE 802.16e, new wireless systems, and even ADSL and FTTH wired access media to provide fully-integrated services. Furthermore, I will present results of our research and development activities related to the pervasive computing, such as operation of a communication and broadcasting integrated system and development of an ultra low delay mobile network.