30.09.2009 CWC researchers won the WINCOOL 2009 demo contest in Beijing
Researchers from CWC have won the first place in the international WINCOOL 2009 demo contest held in Beijing, China. Research scientist Hannu Tuomivaara, research manager Matti Raustia and research assistant Markku Jokinen grasped the gold medal with their demonstration of Distributed TDMA MAC Protocol with OLSR Routing. The victorious performance was rewarded with a sum of 2000 US dollars.
A part of ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds (WinTECH), this year’s demo competition had a wide topic area of wireless systems from physical to application layer. The real catch was, the contest was especially restricted to operational prototypes: No Powerpoint slides or videos were allowed – it had to be the real thing.
WARP boards galore
The victorious research team implemented their distributed TDMA MAC and multi hop OLSR routing on wireless open-access research platform (WARP) boards running Linux. WARP board, a highly customizable wireless platform with an FPGA and up to four radio cards is especially well suited for prototyping PHY/MAC/NET-layer network designs.
The development of WARP technology was started in 2006 by Rice University, a close research partner of Centre for Wireless Communications. CWC was one of the first research institutes to adopt the technology, which is now encompassed by the likes of NASA, Nokia and Motorola. CWC has conducted numerous novel implementations on the board, not the least of which is the in-house designed software architecture, which enables running Linux and utilizing various routing protocols on WARP.
The results are convincing: The CWC Team WARP finished ahead several distinguished research group including the runner-ups from RWTH Aachen University presenting Reconfigurable Framework for Adaptive OFDM Transmission. Among the competitors were also teams from the Italian University of L’Aquila, Chinese Academy of Science and University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Genuinely novel
However, the triumphant display of technological talent had more going for it than just running a protocol on a flexible platform. The work is also scientifically notable: “We achieved something genuinely novel with our performance: A dynamic TDMA MAC which needs no master in the network, enables late-entry of nodes, network merging, and time-slot reuse… It is the kind of tech of which there is only a handful of related publications available”, tells Matti Raustia, the manager of the research team.
He sees many uses for the Linux enriched WARP board in the near future.
“The methods we demonstrated may be used to develop new security related waveforms. Also, with the Linux operating system and easy-to-use graphic control software we used on the board, WARP will make a fine software defined radio platform.”
We shall see Team WARP hot in action the next time in November with a demonstration featuring distributed spectrum sensing, opportunistic spectrum usage and an adaptive physical layer. This will be the first version of CWC’s cognitive radio network demonstration.
More information
Research scientist Jaakko Seppälä, Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), Jaakko.seppala at ee.oulu.fi, p. +358 8 553 2855