Dean Christakos« Why I Don't Drive to Work | Main | The Summer Spike In Gas Prices »
October 29, 2006
What It Is That I Do, Exactly
People sometimes ask what I do for a living, and this can be difficult to explain. However, I think I should give it a try, if only as an exercise in trying to sound coherent to the technological layperson.
This is where I work:
So, many of you might be familiar with "802.11" networks... it's what's listed as what your laptop is capable of when it comes to wireless networks. 802.11 is a standard that describes wireless local area networks whose range is about 100 meters and which operate in the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz radio frequency spectrum. In short, it's what allows you to open up your laptop and get access to the internet without having to think too hard about the issue.
I work on two different wireless networking standards-- 802.16 and 802.21. Both of these are "frameworks" that describe how certain technologies should work, rather than describing which specific technologies are used to implement them. 802.16 is more commonly known as WiMAX, which is a framework that describes technologies whose purpose is to deliver broadband internet into the home wirelessly (as opposed to over cable TV or phone lines, as is more commonly the case). Part of my work involves dealing with handoffs between 802.16 networks-- this technology should allow someone to walk between two separate 802.16 networks (e.g., from your house to your next-door neighbor's house) and be able to maintain your network connection uninterrupted. Because this standard is still in flux, the work I am doing involves trying to show how we can maintain quality-of-service guarantees under different conditions while doing these handoffs.
That relates to my other work, which is the evolving 802.21 standard which is all about handoffs. As I pointed out above, 802.16 is a "framework," so there could be many different types of 802.16 networks in place. Or someone might be communicating on a standard 802.11 network or some other short-range wireless networking technology. 802.21 is a framework for allowing one to seamlessly pass from one network to another and still maintain one's network connection.
Much of my background is in network simulation, and my current work focuses on implementing these network standards within a network simulation system and evaluating the performance of the networks under different scenarios. Since these standards are still in flux, we can make changes to the implementation of 802.21, evaluate how performance is affected, and present these results to IEEE and IETF and make a case for why certain aspects of the standard should be adopted or discarded.
On a related topic, I first started this weblog back in the summer of 2004 while I was a disaffected graduate student just for the purpose of having a place to post things I came across that I thought were interesting. I'm wondering about whether I should start making more posts about research and technology issues I'm involved in. We'll see. I might try to post more about articles I come across that are closely related to what I'm working on and talk about what I think of them.
Posted by Dean at October 29, 2006 9:42 PM
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