i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 25 July 2011

Previous Newsletters

phd award

Congratulations are due to Mohammed Yousef, who has passed his PhD and is now making minor corrections to his thesis.  His thesis was entitled “Analysis and Mitigation of Routing Loops in IGP Networks”, and studied routing loops in the Internet which, if unchecked, can seriously affect network performance.  His research involved a detailed examination of new techniques to reduce their impact, and he employed both mathematical modelling and computer simulation in his analysis. 

His PhD was supervised by Dr. David K. Hunter.  The external examiner was Dr. Iain Phillips, who is head of the computer science department at Loughborough University, and the internal examiner was Dr. Martin J. Reed. 

The photograph shows Mohammed in traditional Kuwaiti attire.

call for papers - european immersive education initiative summit

Michael Gardner, Director of the Immersive Education Initiative announced the call for papers for the first European Immersive Education Initiative Summit to be held on the 28th and 29th November 2011 at Leganes (Madrid, Spain). The paper submission deadline is 30th September 2011. See http://europe.immersiveeducation.org/events/ied-europe-summit for further information. This summit will address core topics on the use of virtual and mixed-reality environments for online education and training applications. This is the first summit organised by the newly formed European Chapter of the Immersive Education Initiative (http://europe.immersiveeducation.org), and builds on the success of previous iED summits held in Boston and London (http://mediagrid.org/summit/).

ceec 2011

The 3rd Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC 2011) was held on 13 - 14 July at Essex. The idea for CEEC started in 2009 as a CSEE departmental conference and was initiated to gather postgraduate researchers from different disciplines to discuss, compare, and collaborate on a wide range of topics. The majority of CEEC’11 participants came from schools within the University of Essex, with others from the Universities of Edinburgh, Liverpool, Nottingham and Northumbria.
The keynote presentations by Professors Ghanbari and Hawksford were very popular. Professor Hawksford spoke on an alternative approach to conventional power amplifier design which has been gaining popularity in recent years: switching power amplifiers. Professor Ghanbari spoke on how to conduct successful research as a PhD student and highlighted his experiences during his many years of research in video networking at Essex. His presentation received a lot of positive feedback suggesting organising a seminar to glean more from his extensive knowledge as a researcher.
Recruitment for CEEC 2012 is now taking place. Please contact Laith Al-Jobouri (lamoha@essex.ac.uk) if you would like to join the CEEC’12 organising committee.

forthcoming seminar

Title: Limited Feedback for MIMO Systems with Side Information
Speakers: Professors Xiuying Cao and Yan Wang
Affiliation: Southeast University, China
Date/Time: Friday 5th August, 2 - 3 pm
Location: Seminar Room (1N1.4.1)

Abstract: To fully exploit the potential of a MIMO system, the transmitter must know the Channel State Information (CSI). The most promising solution is to feedback the quantized CSI from the receiver to the transmitter. However, current researches in this topic are very insufficient, especially in multi-user MIMO scenarios where the feedback load and interferences among users are daunting. In this presentation, the introduction of a general MIMO channel model and key issues in MIMO will be presented. Theoretical results will be given to show how much penalty the spatial diversity gain and array gain will pay when feedback errors or feedback delay occur. A new scheduling method is proposed by exploiting users’ location information and the wireless digital map.

book published

Xiaoyun Li, David K Hunter, Chris J Bleakley, "Distributed Topology Awareness in WSNs Using Connectivity and CDS: Coordinator-Free Algorithms to Achieve Full Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks", LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011.

Abstract: In this book a distributed algorithm is introduced for coordinate-free Wireless Sensor Networks to elect a small subset of nodes achieving full coverage. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that a practical and efficient algorithm for electing a sub-optimal subset of nodes for full coverage is introduced only using connectivity information. It also provides an efficient way to detect accurate boundary of un-triangulated holes and recovery them in Wireless Sensor Networks. A distributed hole recovery (DHR) algorithm is also introduced, which is executed on the nodes which define the hole boundary. It iteratively activates only those redundant nodes required to recover the hole. Each node knows about nodes only one or two hops away, as well as information about the connectivity between the boundary nodes enclosing the hole. Another Distributed Boundary Detection (DBD) algorithm for coordinate-free Wireless Sensor Networks is also introduced. It requires only 2-hop neighbor information for each node regardless of node density and network topology.