Sunday Panel: Validating VANET Research: Simulation, Emulation and Testbed

Monday Panel: The Challenges and Solutions: Commercialization Process of Vehicular Wireless Communication Technology

The flourish of large-scale network applications across various types of wireless networks, including vehicular wireless networks, has raised a challenge to network modeling and validation community: A flexible evaluation and validation framework should support experimentation and analysis of close interactions between real applications and realistic network dynamics in wireless environment.

The research conducted in the past few years has proven that this topic is an extremely difficult research question. Hardware-based experimentation testbeds provide realism, but are tightly coupled to the physical environment and circumstances under which experiments are carried out; on the other end, simulation is able to validate the designed systems with more controllability but suffers from a challenge of faithfully modeling the environments; wireless emulator is an alternative approach to overcome the stark tradeoff between the realism of experimentation testbed and the repeatability of simulation-based experimentation, but might need further improvement of scalability.

This panel will take a look at this topic and discuss the pros and cons of each major approach. Among others, questions about the tradeoff of requirements, the current development and future evolution, the research challenges will be discussed.

Peter Steenkiste is a Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the degree of Electrical Engineer from the University of Gent in Belgium in 1982, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1983 and 1987, respectively.
Peter Steenkiste's research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed computing. While at CMU, Peter Steenkiste worked on Nectar, the first workstation clusters built around a high-performance, switch-based local area network. He contributed both to the optimization of the communication subsystem and to the development of programming tools for workstation clusters. The optimization of application-level communication performance over commodity networks was further explored in the Gigabit Nectar and Credit Net projects. All these projects developed prototype systems that were used by a wide range of application groups, allowing a realistic evaluation of the research.
Current research includes the areas of wireless networking, distributed computing, and pervasive computing. The wireless landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. Not only have we seen a rapid growth in the use of wireless, but we are also seeing different types of deployments (e.g. unplanned and managed residential deployments in addition to traditional campus-style deployments) and more diversity in the technologies (e.g. Bluetooth, sensors, ..). Peter Steenkiste is involved in wireless projects in a number of areas, including self-management techniques for residential networks, emulation as a basis for evaluating wireless technologies, and the use of software radios as a platform for flexible, self-optimizing wireless protocols. In the area of distributed computing, he looking at Internet-scale network services that self-configure and self-optimize, i.e. they automatically adapt to changes in the network and load. Peter Steenkiste is also active in pervasive computing in the context of the CMU Aura project. The goal of Aura is to create a distraction-free pervasive computing environment that proactively helps users with daily tasks. In Aura, his research focus is on supporting adaptive and proactive applications, wireless networks, and device-rich spaces.
Peter Steenkiste is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.

Recent developments in the automotive industry -- including standardization efforts such as the IEEE 802.11p (Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments, WAVE) and the IEEE 1609.0-4 and SAE J2735 (Dedicated Short Range Communication, DSRC), and the allocation by FCC of 75 MHz of spectrum at the 5.9 GHz band for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, and a large number of industry development and deployment initiatives at US, Europe and Japan -- point to a new emerging domain of Vehicular Wireless Communication.

Vehicular wireless communication systems are not only envisioned to be a key component of the next-generation cyber physical systems linking the drivers’ real-world experience on the road to the virtual cyber worlds, but also predicted as an emerging field with great potentials to realize the commercial profits. The main reason for the success of this field as a research field is that the related applications have a direct impact on people’s everyday life.

The most challenging commercialization problem that this research community faces today is the technology adoption and future commercialization process. This panel will take a look at this topic and discuss opportunities and obstacles towards using vehicular wireless technology in a variety of applications and systems. Among others, questions about current development, technological evolution and killer applications, deployment platforms and business models will be discussed.

Ravi Puvvala is the CEO of Savari Network, Inc. Previously he served as the founder and CTO of Arada Systems and CEO of Zazu Networks. He has worked with several multinational corporations with rich experience in engineering, management and global understanding of products in wired and wireless networks. A persistent entrepreneur, who is captivated by the power of WiFi and it's proliferation in to various markets. He has been responsible for providing overall strategic direction, technical vision, and technical operational direction for the organization. He received B.S. in Computer Science at Bangalore University, 1990 and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University, 1992.