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Looking into the Future: Grand Challenges
for Wireless Networks
Ness Shroff,
Professor
Purdue University
Abstract
The last two decades have seen an
exponential growth in wireless services
and applications. Wireless
communications and networking that
started with very humble roots, is now
over a trillion-dollar business
worldwide, and represents a substantial
fraction of the economies of the
developed world. However, this is an
industry that is very much in its
infancy, with enormous growth potential
over the next few decades. Even today,
voice and simple data transfers dominate
most of the wireless business, with only
minor forays made into providing more
sophisticated services. The overarching
challenge is to enable sensing,
computing, and communications, anytime,
anywhere, and anyplace. The implications
of such a development could transform
the way we live, work, and interact,
much in the same way as the industrial
revolution, internal combustion engine,
air travel, and the Internet brought
about revolutionary changes at different
epochs in our history. The ability to
sense and control one’s environment via
a complex array of inexpensive sensor
networks capable of distributed
computation will result in significant
improvements in quality of life,
especially for individuals who need
assistance due to physical disabilities,
sickness, or old age. Sensors and
rapidly deployable ad hoc wireless
networks will also change the way
warfare is conducted, resulting in
significantly reduced casualties,
especially in urban warfare settings.
Multi-hop wireless mesh networks could
enable ultra high-speed communications
all the way to the home, potentially
solving the “last-mile” problem that
will fuel a slew of extremely
high-resolution multimedia services
currently in the realm of science
fiction. This talk will describe some of
these "grand opportunities" for wireless
systems and the grand challenges that
face their development.
Biography
 Ness B.
Shroff is a Professor of Electrical
and Computer Engineering at Purdue and
director of the Center for Wireless
Systems and Applications (CWSA), a
university-wide center on wireless
systems and applications. He will be
joining the Ohio State University as the
Ohio Eminent Scholar in Networking and
Communications and Professor of ECE and
CSE. His research interests span the
areas of wireless and wireline
communication networks, where he
investigates fundamental problems in the
design, control, performance, pricing,
and security of these networks.
Dr. Shroff is an active member in the
networking research community and has
been involved in the leadership of
various conferences and journals. He
currently serves on the editorial boards
of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
and the Computer Networks Journal. He
was the technical program co-chair of
IEEE INFOCOM'03, the premier conference
in communication networking. He was also
the conference chair of the 14th Annual
IEEE Computer Communications Workshop
(CCW'99), the program co-chair for the
symposium on high-speed networks, IEEE
Globecom 2001, and the panel co-chair
for ACM Mobicom'02. Dr. Shroff was also
a co-organizer of the NSF workshop on
Fundamental Research in Networking, held
in Arlie House Virginia, in 2003.
Dr. Shroff is a Fellow of the IEEE and
has received numerous awards for his
research, including the IEEE INFOCOM'06
best paper award, the IEEE IWQoS'06 best
student paper award, the best paper of
the year award for KICS/IEEE journal of
Communications and Networks (JCN), and
the best paper of the year award for the
Computer Networks journal, and the NSF
CAREER award (his IEEE INFOCOM 2005
paper was also selected as one of two
runner-up papers for the best paper
award). |
