Write-up run-in

My plan was to have a first draft of the thesis by the end of March; which is still possible, but not sure what state. I’ve plenty of writing and rewriting to do, as well as analysing experiments. Well, I’d thought I should write a quick summary of what I need to, and then come back to it and the end of the month to see how I got on.

• Chapter 6 review and proof.
• Chapter 2 and 3; filling-in gaps and proofing.
• Running simulations and extracting data.
• Running basic experiments and analysing data.
• Filling-out chapter 7 to describe the approach, simulation, and experiments.
• Chapter 8; adding results and interpretation.
• Conclusion and introduction chapters (include if time?)

Fun with simulators

Having found a new simulation library the other week, I spent the weekend installing and modifying the samples to get some statistics for some experiments I need to run.

The library is ns-miracle for NS-2. It’s a cross-layer messaging and dynamic module loading extension to the popular open source networking research tool. It has the UMTS Eurane extension as well as some extensions to the propagation models. I like the way you can build a network stack – very configurable and extendible. I’m thinking this could be useful to extending my research – but maybe after my thesis.

Installation was relatively straightforward on my Ubuntu laptop, using the website documentation. Even though I’d not used NS-2 for a few years, I did not take long to understand the code and make a few modifications to the samples for WLAN and UMTS simulation. It does take some reading of the source code to understand the way they use the tracing.

For now, I’ll write some scripts and analyse some traces to get signal and QoS statistics for WLAN and UMTS. I’ll post some scripts up on IntStack once I’m comfortable with them. Further work could involve integrating my Python code as a module and use cross-layer messages to perform events and actions on other parts of the stack. Also, it would be interesting to see how the results compare with other simulators like Opnet and NCTUns.

Poster submission

I’ve submitted a poster (pdf) to the faculty’s research seminar. Mainly done as an summary exercise, and some results for the fuzzy decision-making bit. The first version had far too much text for a poster, but with a bit of work could be turned into a technical report or paper. (Maybe).

Scholar resources

freeimages.co.uk

An early morning read of my Google feeds, led me to some nice posts from lifehacker that were still unread. Notably some useful websites for those interested in scholarly resources. Scholarpedia has articles that are more specific domains than Wikipedia, but with peer-reviewed approach. Sub-divided into encyclopaedias, the one on Computational Intelligence looks great for AI types.

Some others that my be of interest, but I’ve yet to try fully, are Bartleby: a sort of dictionary, wiki, quote DB; and MathWorld: for finding that elusive formula, maybe.

First post: thesis writing progress

Well, I’ve been meaning to write a post for a while now, but all my energies have been devoted to writing thesis chapters, conducting experiments, debugging dodgy code, and generally trying not to go insane. I should probably introduce the fact that I am in the final stages of composing my Ph.D thesis. The context in wireless communications, principally heterogeneous wireless networks.

I’d thought to write this post as a sort of status report on where I am with writing, and at what point I might finish; a web-based therapy (though I am pleased to say there are some good PhD communities out there: PhinisheD and the forums on findaphd). Currently the aim is to have a first draft done by the end of September, but that could be a slim chance indeed. I am hoping the hardest part is done, with putting initial thoughts down; whatever form they take. Now, the writing process is filling-in gaps, cutting strange phrases, and refining arguments; not to mention the constant editing of diagrams. I would liked to have written a more posts about my thesis writing process. Ultimately because it helps to get bottled-up ‘process thoughts’ out there, somewhere; and maybe that some links, thoughts, and discussions might help other students in the same turmoil.

This blog will basically be thoughts about things I find interesting, or worthy of discussion. Hmm… we’ll see what turns up.