Research Statement
The vision of smart environments - also known as “Internet of Things” - is characterized by the seamless integration of embedded, ambient devices for user assistance. Building highly cooperative device ensembles with a broad spectrum of different device classes such as sensors, actors, smart displays and especially mobile nodes like smart phones leads to highly complex networks that provide distributed, context-based information services e.g. in public facilities or smart offices.
The increasing number of WLAN-capable consumer devices lets WLAN mesh networks appear as a promising technology for this scenario, by providing redundant multi-hop network paths and therefore a higher scalability, flexibility and robustness compared to common infrastructure WLANs. Besides these advantages, characteristics such as variable network topologies and link qualities due to mesh node mobility and the general performance limits of contention based channel access also imply new technical challenges for the management and real-world operation of WLAN mesh networks. IEEE 802.11s is a new WLAN-Standard, enabling vendor-independent mesh networks based on the existing and widespread WLAN technology. Nevertheless, network-wide management mechanisms fall out of 802.11s’s standardization scope and are therefore not specified.
The aim of my work is the development of strategies for dynamic resource management and application-specific parameter optimization in 802.11s WLAN mesh networks to improve network properties such as mesh topology, channel interference, link throughput or latency for overlying, distributed applications and services. This requires the derivation of service requirements and the analysis of complex mesh topologies comprising a large number of mobile nodes.
Publications
| Michael Rethfeldt, Peter Danielis and Moritz Guido, Design and Development of a Management Solution for Wireless Mesh Networks based on IEEE 802.11s, in: 14th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Network and Service Management (IM 2015), 2015. | |
Bjoern Konieczek, Michael Rethfeldt, Frank Golatowski and Dirk Timmermann, Real-Time Communication for the Internet of Things using jCoAP, in: 18th IEEE Symposium on Real-Time Computing (ISORC), 2015.
