Dr. Jiang (Linda) Xie and Dr. Ivan Howitt of the Lee College of Engineering's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department have won two National Science Foundation grant awards totaling more than $500,000.

Grant 1:

The first grant is $275,000 to Dr. Xie for the research project "Mobility Management in Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks." This grant is from NSF's Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program.

Dr. Linda Xie

The objective of this research is to develop scalable and cost-effective mobility management mechanisms for hybrid wireless mesh networks. The wireless mesh network technology is a promising solution to building large-scale wireless Internet with quick and easy deployment. It has numerous applications, such as broadband Internet access, building automation, and intelligent transportation systems. The indispensable technology enabling large-area roaming in wireless mesh networks is mobility management. With the support of mobility management, mobile users can freely roam with uninterrupted services, enjoying the wide-area wireless access.

Dr. Xie's research group will investigate the unique challenges in wireless mesh networks and use a cross-layer approach which is based on the integrated design of mobility management with efficient medium access control and wireless multihop routing so that seamless mobility can be supported. This research will provide innovative techniques to numerous applications of the wireless mesh network technology.

Grant 2:

The second grant is $254,000 to Dr. Xie and Dr. Ivan Howitt for the research project "Versatile Hardware Emulator for ISM-band Network Management." This grant is from NSF's Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program.

Dr. Ivan Howitt

The objective of this project is to develop and validate the methodology of using an innovative hardware emulator for experimental investigations of industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM)-band wireless network research. Co-located wireless networks operating in the same unlicensed ISM band cause interference to each other because of spectral overlap. Interference sources impact the performance of ISM-band wireless networks significantly and dynamically.

This project will develop a versatile hardware-based emulator that can support controllable, repeatable, and scalable experiments over a wide range of ISM-band wireless networks (2-6GHz), including IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n, IEEE 802.15.4, and Bluetooth networks. The hardware emulator can especially serve as a convenient research tool for investigating the unique interference issue in ISM bands by providing a controllable interference environment. The methodology for building ISM-band hardware emulators is beneficial to industry companies designing and implementing cost-effective wireless networking protocols, especially those university-based startup companies.