Tutorial 1

Title

Radiowave Channel Modeling for Radio Networks

Presenter

Costas Constantinou, The University of Birmingham, UK

Abstract

This tutorial is an introduction to antennas and propagation for the non-specialist. As such it will adopt a mathematically minimalist approach in describing various terrestrial radio channel models relevant to mobile ad hoc networks, and will briefly cover topics in diversity systems and adaptive antennas. At all points in the tutorial the emphasis will be on presenting, rather than deriving, results and highlighting their relevance to ad hoc network protocols. Furthermore, a central aim of the tutorial will be to impart physical insights together with information on radio channel modelling methodologies.

Biography

Costas Constantinou is a Senior Lecturer in Communications Engineering at The University of Birmingham, UK. He has been working on electromagnetics, radiowave propagation modelling in urban areas and mobile radio since 1991 and has published numerous papers in this area. His research interest in networks (fixed and increasingly wireless) is fairly recent, as it begun after a sabbatical at BTexact in 1997. His professional activities include membership of the IEE, IEEE, Institute of Physics, and the UK Panel member for Commission B (Fields and Waves) of the International Union for Radio Science (URSI). He is a Chartered Engineer and a Chartered Physicist. See http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/ConstantinouCC/ for further details.

Tutorial 2

Title

Directional Antenna Systems in Ad Hoc Networking

Presenters

Ram Ramanathan, BBN Technologies
Mineo Takai, University of California at Los Angeles and Scalable Network Technologies
Nitin Vaidya, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

Directional antenna systems are increasingly being recognized as a powerful way for increasing the capacity, connectivity, and covertness of ad hoc networks. This tutorial will provide attendees with a broad overview of the problems in, and solution approaches for utilizing these antenna systems in ad hoc networking. We will describe research issues in medium access, neighbor discovery, and routing associated with directional communications in ad hoc networks, and survey the state of the art. We shall also present the tools and techniques for modeling directional communications in ad hoc networks, and briefly describe the design and implementation of a real-life prototypical ad hoc network utilizing directional antenna systems. We shall begin with an overview of the key challenges, motivation, and potential impact of directional communications in ad hoc networks. Next, we shall provide the attendee with a minimal background on directional antenna systems -- how they work, their limitations, the different types, and the requisite terminology. We shall then discuss the research in medium access control with these antenna systems and also briefly
consider the impact of the antennas on routing protocol design. We shall also discuss the unique challenges in neighbor discovery when one or both ends need to beamform, and outline some techniques that can be used. Since much of the research in ad hoc networking relies on modeling and simulation for evaluating new techniques, we shall next describe the tools and techniques for modeling directional antenna systems. Finally, we shall put it all together by describing a design concept for a real-life prototype, and our experiences with the demonstration of a testbed of ad hoc networks with switched directional antenna system.

Intended Audience

This tutorial is designed to provide an overview of issues related to design of wireless ad hoc networks that support and exploit switched and steered beamforming (smart) antennas. The tutorial should benefit researchers as well as practitioners from industry and academia, who are interested in areas related to wireless communications, and mobile networking.

Biographies

Ram Ramanathan is a Division Scientist at BBN Technologies. He received his Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1985. He received his M.S and Ph.D degrees in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Delaware, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. Dr. Ramanathan's research interests at present are focused on mobile ad hoc wireless networking, including topology control, beamforming antennas, medium access control and dynamic spectrum management. Over the past few years, he has led several projects on advanced ad hoc networking for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Currently, he is the co-Principal Investigator for the DARPA project Utilizing Directional Antennas for Ad Hoc Networking (UDAAN), as part of which the first prototype ad hoc networking system with directional antennas was designed, simulated and field-demonstrated. Ram has served on the MobiHoc steeering committee and has been in the program committees of several conferences including MobiCom and MobiHoc. He serves on the editorial board of Ad Hoc Networks journal. He is the co-recipient of the best classified paper award at Milcom 2002 for a paper on ad hoc networking with directional antennas. His work on wide area multicasting received the best paper award at IEEE Infocom 1996, and his paper on scheduling algorithms received the best student paper award at ACM Sigcomm 1992. Ram is a senior member of the IEEE Computer society.

Mineo Takai is a Principal Development Engineer in the Computer Science Department at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is also a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Scalable Network Technologies. Dr. Takai received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Waseda University, Japan in 1997. He has been involved in several DARPA programs including GloMo (Global Mobile Information Systems), NMS (Network Modeling and Simulation) and FCS Comms (Future Combat Systems Communications). Under these projects, he was a key personnel in the design and implementation of several modeling and simulation tools including PARSEC, GloMoSim and QualNet. His research is focused on the design and analysis of mobile computing and communication systems including wireless local area networks and mobile ad hoc networks with his backgrounds on modeling and simulation of discrete event systems. He serves on the program committee of ACM/IEEE PADS (International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulation), ACM MSWiM (International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems), and SCS CNDS (Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulation Conference). Dr. Takai is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.

Nitin Vaidya received Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is presently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Sun Microsystems and the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay. Prior to joining UIUC, he served as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Texas A&M University. His current research is in the areas of wireless networking and mobile computing. In particular, he has performed extensive research on routing and medium access control protocols for wireless ad hoc networks, distributed algorithms on ad hoc networks, and performance of TCP over wireless networks. His research has been funded by various agencies, including the National Science Foundation, DARPA, BBN Technologies, Microsoft Research and Sun Microsystems. Nitin Vaidya is a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. Nitin serves as Program Co-Chair for 2003 ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), and served as the General Chair for the 2001 ACM Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), and co-program chair for MobiHoc 2000. He presently serves on or has previously served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Networks, and ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks journals. He is a senior member of IEEE Computer Society and a member of the ACM. For more information, please visit http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~nhv/.