Research Project: Visualizations for Wireless Communication

Mentor: Diane Souvaine, Computer Science, Rutgers.
Email: dls@cs.rutgers.edu

Project is on geometric algorithms and visualization associated with wireless communications. It is part of DIMACS' Simulations of Integrated Communications Systems project.

Goal:

Applying computational geometry methods and algorithms to the wireless communications field

Purpose:

To produce a framework in which engineers can easily develop their own propagation modeling systems and wireless nettwork simulators. The reason for research in this area is because of its increasing popularity and need for prediction methods, transmitter functionality, hand-off strategies, frequency reuse, delay spread and interference.

In the project, we have and plan to use a number of data structures (in and 2-Dimensions and 3-Dimensions), useful projections (so that in some cases, one can work with 3D structures while using 2D algorithms, which are faster and easier to use), a terrain approximation algorithm and an underlying layer that will provide robust geometric calculations for one's system.

Specifications:

Algorithms used:
  • Voronoi diagram, 2D and 3D
  • Visibility
  • Point Location
  • Polygon and Polyhedron intersection
  • Ray and cone reflection
  • Number of obstacles blocking line-of-sight
  • Number of obstacles within Freznel Zones (2D and 3D test)
  • Qualitative Modeling
  • Ray/Cone preprocessing
    • Software:
    I have chosen Geomview as our display engine to display our simulation project. The following are the advantages of using Geomview:
  • Geomview handles any piece of data as long as its geometry, points of interaction, speed of movement, appearance of surfaces and lines are supplied.
  • The simplest way to use Geomview is as a standalone viewer to see and manipulate objects. Geomview supplies some example objects, but it easily lets user to create their objects also.
  • External modules, programs that generate objects and use geomview as an interface to display them, can control almost any aspect of geomview.
  • The BIGGEST advantage of geomview is to give user an ability to run multiple modules at the same time. (For example, it lets you open various data objects on top of each other on the same camera, which are entirely independent of each other - inheriting some of the ideas of object-orientation.)
  • Furthermore, ease of use is even increased further by its interactive operations. Any type of operation (including zooming, resizing, transforming, rotating) can be performed *while* geomview is running with the objects loaded.
    • Coming up soon: pictures taken during the actual simulation!!!
    Back to Home