Designing and controlling the emerging communication networks: Challenges and results

Date: Friday 29 May 2009
Time: 3:10 p.m. Location: Room 031, Erskine Building
Contact: For further information regarding this event, please contact Dr. Neville Churcher by sending email to neville.churcher@canterbury.ac.nz or by calling 2352
Audience: University staff and students

The Computer Science and Software Engineering Department are hosting a seminar by Dr Chi-Kin Chau (Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering University of Cambridge) entitled "Designing and controlling the emerging communication networks: Challenges and results".

Synopsis: Communication networks (e.g. Internet, telecommunication networks, wireless cellular networks) are among the largest artificial systems that human have ever built. But the designs and controls of these networks are still beyond our comprehension. Traditional communication networks often rely on the presumption of stationarity (with minimal network dynamics and abundant energy resource), homogeneity (with a single design or compatible protocols), and socialism (with limited malicious or selfish intents).
(Near) future communication networks will evolve to be increasingly ad hoc, heterogeneous, and non-cooperative. In this talk, I will discuss some of the challenges of designing and controlling these emerging communication networks. Also, I will present my recent work to address the related practical and fundamental issues, such as capacity, energy efficiency, latency, robustness, security, interoperability of these communication networks.

Biography: Dr Chau is a Croucher Foundation research fellow at Department of Electronic & electrical Engineering, University College London, awarded a two year independent full funding by the Croucher Foundation Hong Kong (including full stipends, research grants and travel allowances), for researching into wireless communications. Meantime, he is also a primary researcher associated with University of Cambridge under the International Technology Alliance in Network and Information Science (ITA), which is a joint research consortium of 24 leading academic and industrial institutes in the US and UK, funded by a $160M 10-year research contract from the Ministry of Defence (UK) and Army Research Laboratory (US) for information sciences and communications research in ad hoc networks and senor technologies.