Wireless Communications in the Era of Big Data

The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adaptable for managing the bigdata traffic in wireless networks. On the other hand, instead of viewing mobile bigdata as a unwanted burden, we introduce methods to capitalize from the vast data traffic, for building a bigdata-aware wireless network with better wireless service quality and new mobile applications. We highlight several promising future research directions for wireless communications in the mobile bigdata era.Comment: This article is accepted and to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild

This paper explores the feasibility, advantages, and challenges of an ICN-based approach in the Internet of Things. We report on the first NDN experiments in a life-size IoT deployment, spread over tens of rooms on several floors of a building. Based on the insights gained with these experiments, the paper analyses the shortcomings of CCN applied to IoT. Several interoperable CCN enhancements are then proposed and evaluated. We significantly decreased control traffic (i.e., interest messages) and leverage data path and caching to match IoT requirements in terms of energy and bandwidth constraints. Our optimizations increase content availability in case of IoT nodes with intermittent activity. This paper also provides the first experimental comparison of CCN with the common IoT standards 6LoWPAN/RPL/UDP.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures and tables, ACM ICN-2014 conferenc

The British Geological Survey's new Geomagnetic Data Web Service

Increasing demand within the geomagnetism community for high quality real-time or near-real-time observatory data means there is a requirement for data producers to have a robust and scalable data processing infrastructure capable of delivering geomagnetic data products over the Internet in a variety of formats. We describe a new software system, developed at BGS, which will allow access to our geomagnetic data products both within our organisation's intranet and over the Internet. We demonstrate how the system is designed to afford easy access to the data by a wide range of software clients and allow rapid development of software utilizing our observatory data