Seminars & Colloquia
Elizabeth Belding
University of California, Santa Barbara
"GROWMesh: Organic Growth Mesh Networks for Developing Regions"
Tuesday February 03, 2009 10:15 AM
Location: 3211, EB 2 NCSU Centennial Campus
(Visitor parking instructions)
The goal of our research is to make significant strides towards overcoming this divide through the development of inexpensive, self-configuring, self-monitoring, and self-sustaining wireless mesh network communication solutions that are robust to power outages and that support continued organic network growth through local citizens. Due to low literacy rates and an urgent need for basic communication in developing regions, our solutions must support the transmission of real-time voice and video traffic. While we intend for our solutions to be broadly applicable, we focus our attention specifically on rural Africa to leverage our partnerships with the Meraka Institute in South Africa and the LinkNet project in Zambia. We call this project GROWMesh, to represent the idea of network growth through local citizens that does not require a high degree of local engineering or customization.
In this talk, we will present some of our recent research on dynamic and adaptive solutions for monitoring wireless networks, conserving network power, and supporting real-time multimedia traffic. We will discuss the applicability of these solutions to networks in developing regions, and present a path for turning our GROWMesh vision into a reality.
Host: George Rouskas, Computer Science, NCSU