March 12, 2009
Amrita Research Labs, Amritapuri
 

Weedev 2009 (Workshop on Experimental Evaluation and Deployment Experiences on Vehicular Networks) will be organized in Washington DC on April 6, 2009. Research associates from the Amrita Research Labs will travel to DC in order to present their research paper titled Mesh-Tree Topology for Vehicular Networks. The paper proposes an innovative architecture for the delivery of multimedia information to public transportation systems. The architecture is currently being deployed in school and college buses used by the Amrita educational institutions.
 

“We have been able to demonstrate low latency and high throughput data transfer to the buses,” stated Sriram Karunagaran, one of the co-authors of the research paper. “When using a chain toplogy, any one of the links could break, disabling the network completely. Chain topology is also known to result in high hop counts and poor end-to-end latency. The mesh-tree architecture overrides some of these disadvantages.” The paper discusses the architecture, antenna selection, deployment and performance results of a 14-node multihop 802.11a/g based wireless test bed that mimics a large bus terminus. The results underscore the potential utility of this architecture.

Sudharsan, Jayaraj Poroor, Amit Dhar and Ranjith Pillai, also of Amrita Research Labs, worked with Sriram on different aspects of the research project and are also co-authors of the paper. The project was funded by the Core Automotive Research Group of India’s TIFAC that promotes the development of indigenous technologies for the automotive industry. The system that is in pilot deployment is based on open-source software such as Linux and off-the-shelf hardware components, thus making it relatively inexpensive to build. It is configurable through a computer connected to the internet via a web server, thus making it very easy to monitor and maintain.