While high-speed wireless access is easy to achieve in an enterprise network via low-cost IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) access points, wireless technology in public spaces is in its infancy. "Hot spots" provide high-speed wireless access, but do so in very few isolated "islands" at immense costs. Likewise, while fixed wireless and 3G can provide ubiquitous coverage and 3G can support mobility, throughputs can often be two orders of magnitude slower than WiFi. In this talk, I will make the case for the requirement of a fundamental new architecture based on beamforming antennas deployed on fixed, Transit Access Points (TAPs) that form a multi-hopping wireless backbone with a limited number of wired ingress/egress points. Moreover, I will describe a number of research issues including opportunistic and coordinated resource management and challenges in achieving fairness.
11:00am
McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall 1055
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* Biography:
Edward Knightly is an associate professor in the ECE and CS Departments at Rice University. He received the B.S. degree from Auburn University in 1991 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and 1996 respectively. He is an associate editor of the Computer Networks Journal and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and previously, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and IEEE Network Magazine. He served as co-chair of IWQoS 1998 and on the steering committee for IWQoS from 1999-2001. He served as finance chair for ACM MOBICOM 2002 and 2003, tutorial co-chair for IEEE ICNP 2001 and MOBIHOC 2003, and on the program committee for numerous networking conferences including ICNP, INFOCOM, IWQoS, MOBICOM, and SIGMETRICS. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1997 and the Sloan Fellowship in 2001. He is the technical co-chair of INFOCOM 2005. His research interests are in the areas of mobile and wireless networks, high-performance protocol design, quality of service, and performance evaluation.