Current Research Projects
These are the various projects that I'm involved in or am interested in (and reading about!). More links etc. may appear as and when I get round to it, but you'll get the idea of what I'm doing from the below. My general area of focus is wireless networking, but I'm also into more generally applicable concepts like charging incentives, security, and so on. See my Bibliography for more details.
Sentient Vehicles & Sentient Transportation
- The Sentient Vehicles Project: deploying computing equipment and sensors on vehicles in order to make them mobile sensor platforms.
- As part of this, The sentient van illustrates exactly what we do in this area, and how we do it, along with our catalogue of links to ITS-related projects.
Wireless Networks
I'm interested in lots of different aspects of wireless networking. My current focus is on optimising vertical handovers, but there's lots more!- Performance of 802.11x, and ensuring that people understand how they should and should not simulate it (see Kotz et al.'s paper on the mistaken axioms of wireless network research)
- Cognitive radio
- MAC protocols (see Bogdan Roman's work)
- Deployment of IEEE 802.16 WiMAX.
Intervehicular Networks & Data Aggregation
- Collecting large quantities of sensor data and processing it to give a compact (but accurate) representation.
- Examining the performance of IEEE 802.11a in vehicular environments.
- Networking sentient vehicles (mesh and more structured). A good tutorial on IEEE 802.11 is worth a read.
- Congestion data collection using WiFi (see my publications page for information on this)
- Data aggregation from sensor networks in transportation
- Pricing/Incentives for congestion control and data collection/use in such networks
- Network provisioning/dynamic re-provisioning networks serving transport in cities. See Google's deployment in Mountain View
Congestion/Road User Charging & ITS
I'm particularly interested in the technologies used for congestion charging/road pricing (see my publications page). I endeavour to make comments in response to articles that are published either in the news or in other form that have misconceptions about how good/bad the technologies actually are.- Satellite positioning technologies (GPS and Galileo)
- Existing electronic toll collection systems and congestion pricing cordons
- Distance-based charging technologies
- National congestion charging schemes
- The Transport Information Monitoring Environment Project
- Routing for vehicles on factors other than simply time or distance. See Camvit (Cambridge Vehicle Information Technology) for interesting developments to traditional personal navigation units.
Mobile IP
(See Pablo Vidales' page for older publications related to this project, and my publications page for newer ones that I was involved with.)- I was responsible for the CL's Mobile IPv6 testbed (now non-functional, due to lack of use)
- Vertical and horizontal handoffs (e.g.WLAN to 3G to GPRS)
- Investigating modifications to TCP to reduce adaptation time for vertical handovers, see my publications page for our paper on TCP adaptation time
- Policy based handovers in heterogenous networks
- Cellular networks in general (I've done a lot of playing with 3G cards, see my HowTo for the Vodafone broadband card under Linux)
Ad hoc Networks
I used to have an interest in ad hoc networking. In particular, my final year undergraduate dissertation concerned the simulation of an energy-aware routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. These days I don't keep up with the field very much, though I do read up on protocols that are specific to vehicles.- Energy-aware mesh networks (see Laura Feeney's pages)
- Maziar Nekovee's work on epidemic protocols for distribution in vehicular ad hoc networks.