The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Wireless Links and Mesh Architectures in the Real World

Invited Speaker: Dr. Robert Poor – Ember Corporation
Date: FRIDAY,September 26th, 2003
Time: 12pm-1pm
Venue: Room # 4760, Boelter Hall, UCLA
http://www.cens.ucla.edu/seminars/seminar_summer03.html

FOR TELE-ATTENDEES: If you are attending remotely, you may wish to access the
slides at: http://www.cens.ucla.edu/censweb/CENS-Seminar-Series/ (Slides
will be available a few minutes before seminar starts.)

Abstract:

Multi-hop mesh architectures are a natural choice for constructing autonomous wireless device networks. Networks built using mesh topologies are often easier to deploy, require less power and less human intervention than those built using star topologies, such 802.11 networks. What is less obvious is that the mesh topology guarantees that nodes in a wireless mesh network will be subject to a high percentage of unreliable and asymmetrical links. This talk will explore the causes and consequences of “the good, the bad, and the ugly” links in mesh network systems.

As time permits, the talk will also feature a demonstration of Ember’s Evaluation Kit.

About the speaker:

For the first decades of his life, Robert Poor hedged his bets between music and technology. He worked for the Grateful Dead as a recording engineer, designed laser film scanners and printers for LucasFilm (later Pixar), wrote Common Lisp compilers at Lucid, Inc, was a professional bass player in the “Loud Family” (www.loudfamily.com), was a Developer Advocate at NeXT, Inc (posthumous creators of OS X), received a BFA in Electronic Music from Oberlin Conservatory and ran the engineering team at Opcode Systems. He became a student at the MIT Media Laboratory in 1995, where he received his Master’s degree in 1997 and his Ph.D. in 2001. He is a co-founder of Ember Corporation; a company that sells wireless embedded networking systems for OEMs and System Integrators.