News and Notes for Our Industrial Partners
July 2008
RESEARCH
Broadband Roundtable
The report has been completed for the broadband roundtable. The roundtable was set up by the state of Virginia and run by former Virginia Governor Mr. Mark Warner. The purpose of the discussions was to look at how rural communities can have broadband Internet access. Applications for the state, especially public safety, were discussed. The results of the discussions are expected to result in legislation at the state level.
Pilot Program with Navy
W@VT will be working with 3e Technologies International as part of a pilot program with the Navy. This will be a three phase program. During the first stage, we will identify requirements and develop a preliminary design. This design will consist of a dual channel software defined radio that uses Virginia Tech's OSSIE software, which is based on the Software Communications Architecture developed by the U.S. Department of Defense to bridge analog and digital voice communications. The hardware will be developed by 3eTI. We will expand on these concepts in Phase 2 of the project. Dr. Carl Dietrich will be leading this effort.
Networked Vehicle/Networked Infrastructure Research at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI)
Ashwin Amanna
Senior Research Associate
Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
3500 Transportation Research Plaza
Blacksburg, VA 24061
(540) 231-1066
ashwin@vtti.vt.edu
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) is the largest research center at Virginia Tech, with program areas encompassing a broad spectrum of transportation related applications. As the world moves towards ubiquitous connectivity, the vehicle and the roadside infrastructure are becoming the next extensions of our networked world. VTTI’s Networked Vehicle/Networked Infrastructure research thrusts focus on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-roadside (V2R), and wireless IP backbone communications. The Smart Road, Virginia Tech/VDOT’s (Virginia Department of Transportation) one-of-a-kind full scale highway controlled research testbed provides the perfect laboratory for developing and optimizing wireless communications for transportation applications.
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) envisions a national architecture of V2V and V2R systems to enhance safety and mobility called Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII). VTTI is currently focusing on developing intersection collision avoidance systems using high-speed/low latency Dedication Short-Range Communications (DSRC) systems based on the 802.11p standards. Figure 1 shows VTTI’s full-scale signalized intersection used to research Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance Systems (CICAS). Vehicles equipped with DSRC systems and differential GPS systems interface with a roadside signal controller and central control agent to predict potential collisions and warn approaching drivers. Potential research ideas include investigating WiMAX and 802.22 as enabling technologies for connecting local intersection DSRC systems with a larger network, using Femtocells as an alternative to DSRC/802.11p technology, and employing cognitive radio techniques such as game theory to optimize channel assignments among large numbers of vehicles. VTTI is working with Cisco Systems to deploy wireless backbones to support V2R communications in highway and metro environments. The architecture uses serial links between infrastructure radios, Access Points for complete highway coverage, and mobile access routers located in vehicles. Several multi-node deployments such as 2.4GHz, 5.0GHz, and 4.9GHz, and Mesh architecture have been installed on the Smart Road as illustrated in Figure 2. VTTI uses wireless sniffers combined with network simulation software to characterize system performance at speeds in excess of 70mph.
Research areas have focused on developing best practices for deployment, developing techniques for quantifying hand-off latency between mobile units and roadside Access Points (AP), and determining configuration settings for optimizing the tradeoffs between hand-off latency, signal coverage, and throughput. VTTI supports the needs of the Virginia Department of Transportation by providing technical assistance in the development of a communications master plan. State DOT’s are increasingly turning to IP wireless communications as an alternative to traditional fiber-optics or telephony solutions. IP wireless provides a scalable, quickly deployed, and relatively inexpensive connection to field deployed sensors and digital video cameras for traffic surveillance. Figure 3 illustrates a proposed architecture for evaluation of digital video over a wireless IP backbone.
Power Monitoring in SDR and CR Certification and Security
Carlos R. Aguayo Gonzalez and Jeffrey H. Reed
caguayog@vt.edu
Software-defined radio (SDR) and cognitive radio (CR) have come a long way from a research topic to a technology reality, which delivers increased flexibility, improved utilization of radio resources, and reduced development and manufacturing costs. Now, regulators and standardization bodies are left with the crucial task of deciding whether or not the technologies are safe and secure enough to be deployed. Adequate validation and assessment techniques have to be developed for SDR and CR that give us confidence that such complex and flexible devices can be deployed without disrupting existing networks or compromising users’ information. Researchers at Wireless @ Virginia Tech are currently investigating different approaches to address this complex task. One of the most promising techniques is the use of dynamic power consumption monitoring to identify the operations being executed by the devices. This allows us to determine if the certified code is the one actually running or if malicious code has been inserted. The approach relies on using signal processing to identify power fingerprints for specific sections of code and then comparing them to the runtime power consumption. Preliminary results for this technique are encouraging, with successful identification of simple routines being executed on a basic processor running at low speed. Major challenges still have to be overcome in order to get this technique ready for ubiquitous deployment. For example, performance has to be evaluated for complex and fast new processors with multithreaded operating systems, and resource requirements have to be reduced. However, once these challenges are solved, this approach can deliver an efficient mechanism to improve the reliability and safety of SDR and CR. The impact of this approach can span from allowing regulators to enforce spectrum access policies, to safeguarding the integrity of sensitive information during military operations.