Research Projects

• Self-organizing networks
This project develops new techniques and protocols that allow network nodes to form spontaneous networks, assemble the network themselves, dynamically adapt to device failure and degradation, manage movement of network nodes, and react to changes in task and network requirements. Self-organizing sensor networks can be built using reconfigurable smart sensor nodes that enables sensor devices to be self-aware, self-reconfigurable and autonomous. The three main benefits of these features are as follows. First, they provide capabilities for sensor network nodes used in tactical and surveillance applications for forming impromptu network, deploying sensors incrementally, and to assemble themselves without central administration. Second, they provide capabilities for sensor networks to adapt dynamically to device failure and degradation and changes in task and network requirements. Finally, they Integrate various network and system services provided by mixed types of sensor nodes and embedded defense applications
 
• Sponsors:
• DARPA Sensit Program, IXO
• IMPACT, Auburn University

• Wireless mobile networks
• This project investigates adaptive communication protocols for large-scale mobile information systems and  the performance implications of these protocols. Digital radio technology has tremendous impact on today's mobile computing. This emerging technology has been a catalyst for the development of many advance industrial devices for improving information and data management systems. Advanced techniques for improving radio network capacity are being developed and evaluated. Improvements may be achieved by adapting protocols according to the levels of packet errors, disconnections, and collision. Other methods include overlapping coverage cells on different wavelengths and reducing transmission range so that more cells fit into a given area.

 
• Sponsors:
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• US Navy, Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center (NFESC)

• Mobile databases and computing systems
• This project studies and develops new mobile transactions and client-server caching techniques. Mobile and wirless networks introduce many new sub-problems in distributed computing and information systems that are not present in traditional computer networks, distributed databases and computing systems. We study the effects of this new environment in the design and development of mobile computing and database systems.
• Sponsor:
• National Science Foundation (NSF)

People

• Faculty:
Dr. Alvin Lim
Computer Science and Software Engineering
Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849
Phone: (334) 844-6326
Fax: (334) 844-6329
Email: lim@eng.auburn.edu
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~lim
 
• Students:
• Xuan Yu
• Mark Ivester
• Ye  Wang
• Qiao Shen

Selected Publications

• "Distributed Services for Information Dissemination in Self-Organizing Sensor Networks "

by Alvin Lim, Special Issue on Distributed Sensor Networks for Real-Time Systems with Adaptive Reconfiguration, Journal of Franklin Institute, Elsevier Sciences Publisher, vol. 338, 2001, pp. 707-727.
• "Architecture for Dynamic Information Dissemination and Fusion in Distributed Sensor Networks "

by Alvin Lim, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Fusion, Montreal, Canada, August 7-10, 2001, TuC2, pp. 17-24.
• "Dynamic Information Dissemination for Control of Rapidly Changing Enterprise Systems "

by Alvin Lim, Symposium on Advances in Enterprise Control, Bloomington, Minneapolis, July 2000.
• "Composable Scalable Enterprises with Agile Autonomous Components, "

by Alvin Lim, Next Generation Enterprises: Virtual Organizations and Mobile/Pervasive Technologies, ACM, IEEE, Buffalo, New York, April 27-29, 2000.
• "A Scalable System Architecture for Autonomous Decentralized Control of Large Adaptive Enterprises, "

by Alvin Lim, Symposium on Advances in Enterprise Control, San Diego, California, November 1999.
• "Improving Performance of Adaptive Media Access Control Protocols for High-density Wireless Networks"

by Alvin Lim and Kui Mok, IEEE International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Networks, Perth, Australia, June 1999.
• "A Study on the Design of Large-Scale Mobile Recording and Tracking Systems"

by Alvin Lim and Kui Mok, 31th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, Jan 1998.
• "Wireless Media Access Control for Highly Mobile Information Servers: Simulation and Performance Evaluation"

by Alvin Lim, Kui Mok, ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review, Vol 1, No. 2, 1997.