Keynote 1: The evolving wireless landscape: converge to 4G
Brief Bio of Prof. Mario Gerla:
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:
It is well accepted now that the 4th Generation Wireless Architecture will be a synergy of established and emerging wireless technologies in a new wireless Internet infrastructure.
One emerging technology to watch is ad hoc networking. Up to now ad hoc network applications (battlefield, disaster recovery, homeland defense, etc) have been self-standing and antagonistic to the notion of "infrastructure networks and the Internet". It is a fact, however, that standalone, self configured ad hoc networks have a hard time finding commercial applications and touching people's everyday lives. A new concept that will reverse this trend and will help bring ad hoc nets into the 4th Generation family is the notion of "opportunistic ad hoc networks" - namely, ad hoc subnetworks which connect to the Internet using existing wireless links (eg, 802.11, UMTS or satellites), seeking the opportunity to extend its functionality and reach. One interesting example is the "urban wireless grid". Opportunistic grid applications range from kids playing Internet games from the back seats of their cars; to nomadic users who commit their packets to cars and busses in the urban grid, for delivery to the nearest Mesh access point, and; to drivers collaboratively downloading multimedia files from roadside Infostations. In this talk, we address the advantages, challenges and standardization future of opportunistic ad hoc networking. The focus will be on the urban vehicular grid, viewed as a dynamic, large scale ad hoc network as well as heterogeneous, mobile, ubiquitous sensor fabric - with applications to car navigation safety; entertainment, and; homeland defense.
