Dallas-ARea Testbed for Context-Aware, Cognitive Research (DART-CARs)
Wireless system performance is known to be highly dependent upon the characteristics of the environment. Despite the increasing ability of wireless devices to sense their surroundings, wireless systems have yet to fully leverage contextual data to improve performance. To this end, DART-CARs is an NSF-funded infrastructure (NSF CISE CRI) that allows the study of wireless performance in a broad class of mobile and static environments in and around the Dallas area from indoor labs to outdoor high-way speeds within a single testbed. Our hardware platform functions across many different wireless bands to enable real-time, multi-band operation. Such a first-of-its-kind infrastructure is critical for designing context-aware and cognitive algorithms that utilize multiple frequency bands to adapt to dynamic environmental settings.
Development of Wireless Networking Testbed and Emulator (WiNeTestEr)
In the evaluation of wireless networks, there is a fundamental tradeoff between the scalability of the experimental environment and the realism of the wireless channel. The greatest degree of scalability can be achieved by simulators which use course channel models, and emulators with the highest degree of fidelity emulate a single link. This NSF-funded project (NSF MRI) aims to bridge the gap between the two extremes to build a versatile wireless networking testbed called Wireless Networking Testbed and Emulator (WiNeTestEr). The main objectives and the novelty of this testbed is in its capability to (i) emulate the large-scale wireless networks in multiple licensed and unlicensed bands, (ii) allow access to local and remote users to configure and control the same emulator, and provide repeatability, (iii) support experiments related to node mobility, multi-antenna (MIMO) operation, and cognitive radios, and (iv) provide an easy-to-use interface for remotely running wireless experiments remotely.
Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP)
The WARP platform is a clean-slate design of media access (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers to prototype advanced wireless networks. Exchange of novel physical and network layers is available via the open-access WARP repository. Joseph Camp was a core member of the initial WARP team and has since designed novel rate selection protocols and experimentally evaluated WARP designs in diverse scenarios, including residential and downtown urban areas. He continues work on WARP with embedded applications in urban contexts.
Technology For All (TFA) Network
The TFA Network is a large-scale wireless mesh deployment which provides Internet access to over 4,000 users in an under-resourced community in Houston, Texas. There is an open repository for measurement studies that have been performed on the network. Joseph Camp was the Chief Network Architect and lead graduate student for the TFA Network where he architected, deployed, operated, and managed the network, designed a number of measurement studies, and modeled network performance.
The driving vision of the TAPs Project was to form a high-performance wireless backbone using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless links. TAPs was an FPGA-based platform that preceded the WARP platform. Joseph Camp designed a CSMA MAC protocol that ran on the embedded processor on the TAPs FPGA and directly interfaced with ns-2 to abstract the other network layers (physical and routing) which were yet to be built.
The 100x100 Project was a collaborative research effort to take a clean-slate approach to fixing problems with today's Internet. Involved with numerous project retreats and teleconferences, Joseph Camp represented students working on the access piece of the Internet infrastructure via a wireless mesh network architecture that served thousands of real users yet allowed programmability and observability for research.