New PhD holder at UTM

New PhD holder at UTM

Tânia Calçada, a researcher at INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), has defended her PhD dissertation on 3 January, and was approved with honours.

22nd January 2013

Entitled Topology Aware Channel Assignment in Single-radio Stub Wireless Mesh Networks, the main contribution of the researcher’s dissertation was an algorithm that distributes radio channels in wireless mesh networks.

The aim with mesh networks is to extend wireless network infrastructures in areas where it is difficult or expensive to install several access points. The mesh network connects the nodes using several hop counts for the wireless connections in order to cover a wider area. The problem with mesh networks is their poor performance, especially when the nodes only have one radio interface. The purpose with this work was to enable the use of multiple radio channels in the network, and thus improve its performance.

To achieve that,Tânia Calçada developed an algorithm that makes it possible to assign frequencies from multiple radio channels to each node according to network topology, that is, according to the way the nodes are connected. The algorithm makes it possible to guarantee connectivity and improve performance. The researcher has demonstrated performance gains around 80%.

In her work, Tânia Calçada outlines three possible practical applications for her algorithm: the first, already mentioned, has to do with extending the network infrastructures for Internet access. Furthermore, the algorithm can also be applied in the smart grids and security areas.

It is important to highlight that Tânia Calçada’s work is already yielding very good results. Recently, INESC TEC was integrated in the European project CONFINE where the algorithm developed by the researcher will be implemented in a European testbed.

UTM/INESC TEC, January 2013