Urban-Scale Networking in the TV White Spaces

February 10, 2010
Ryan Guerra | Rice University

Recent research advances have demonstrated that WiFi-like wireless networks can be built in television-band white spaces (TVWS). In this work, we pose the question, “can urban-scale TVWS networks be built to cost-effectively address the problem of last-mile wireless access?” We develop fine-grained propagation models to consider a large class of urban-scale designs and evaluate their ability to achieve new cost-capacity-coverage design regions. Moreover, we address the potential of TVWS networks to provide new network-wide functionalities such as new modes of energy efficiency and adaptability.

Speaker Details

Ryan E. Guerra is a second-year Ph.D. student at Rice University in the ECE networks group. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2008. His interests lie in wireless network routing, scheduling, and management, and he is currently working with the networking research group at MSR on TV white space networking.Edward Knightly is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He joined Rice in 1996 and was a visiting professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2003. 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. Dr. Knightly is an IEEE Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received the best paper award from ACM MobiCom 2008.Dr. Knightly served as an associate editor for multiple journals including IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and the Computer Networks Journal, and served as guest editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications Special Issue on Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks. He served as general chair of ACM MobiHoc 2009 and ACM MobiSys 2007 and as technical co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2005 and numerous workshops. He regularly serves on the program committee for numerous networking conferences including IEEE INFOCOM, ACM MobiCom, and ACM SIGMETRICS.Dr. Knightly’s research interests are in the areas of mobile and wireless networks and high-performance and denial-of-service resilient protocol design. His experimental research includes deployment and operation of a programmable 4,000 user urban multi-tier multi-hop network in Houston, TX, and design of a high-performance FPGA platform for clean-slate wireless protocol design. His protocol designs include fairness mechanisms that are now part of the IEEE 802.11s mesh and IEEE 802.17 packet ring standards.