Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

07/12/2011

Sooksan Panichpapiboon, who earned his Ph.D. in 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Ozan Tonguz, received the 2011 Dissertation Award from the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) for his doctoral thesis, “Practical Design Issues in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: Transmit Power, Topology and Routing.” His Excellency Mr. Abhisit Vejjajiva, prime minister of the Kingdom of Thailand, presented him with the award earlier this year.

In addition to recognizing Panichpapiboon, who is now a faculty member at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok, the NRCT also honored Tonguz, “as the major advisor who contributed advice and support” to Panichpapiboon's thesis.

For more on the award, visit Panichpapiboon's website.

03/17/2011

Our group member Wantanee Viriyasitavat has recently been nominated as one of the two PhD students who will represent Carnegie Mellon University in the prestigious Google Fellowship competition. Google Fellowship competition is a nationwide competition which is very selective as it allows only the top students in computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments of top universities in the U.S. to be nominated. Wantanee first won the ECE nomination and then was selected as one of the two PhD students (the other PhD student being from the CS Department of CMU) to represent CMU in this prestigious competition. Wantanee will represent CMU in the category of mobile computing which is the area of her PhD thesis research. Wantanee currently works in designing routing protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks and her research is sponsored by General Motors.

01/07/2011

Prof. Ozan Tonguz delivered the Keynote at the IEEE 2010 Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC) that was held in Jersey City, NJ, between December 13-15. The conference was attended by about 100 researchers from academia as well as several companies including Toyota, Honda, Intel, Denso, etc. The title of the Keynote delivered by Prof. Tonguz was:

“Emerging and Future Applications of Vehicular networks: A Vision”

The conference emphasized the research challenges of vehicular ad hoc networks at all layers of the protocol stack. The applications that received the most attention were safety applications, traffic information systems, and entertainment using the new vehicle-to-vehicle communications capability of modern cars.

The Keynote delivered by Prof. Tonguz elaborated on the role of vehicular networks in sustainable energy (via electric cars), greener environment, reduced carbon footprint, and smart grid. In all these themes, the burgeoning role of vehicular ad hoc networks as an important enabler was discussed and emphasized. In particular, the Keynote described a biologically-inspired new scheme known as “Virtual Traffic Lights” (a scheme co-invented in 2009 by Prof. Ozan Tonguz and his collaborator Prof. Michel Ferreira at the U. of Porto and their students) which illustrated how congestion — a Grand Challenge of our times — can be mitigated by the vehicle-to-vehicle communications capability of modern cars. It was articulated that this biologically-inspired scheme can increase flow rates in urban areas by 60% during rush hours which seems quite significant when one considers the implications of such an improvement in reducing the commute time of workers in urban areas, reducing congestion, reducing carbon footprint of future cars, supporting a greener environment, and increased productivity.

11/08/2010

Yi Zhang, a member of Tonguz Research Group, has joined GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY, in August 2010. Yi Zhang was co-advised by Prof. Ozan Tonguz and Prof. Marija Ilic. Yi defended her PhD thesis in July 2010. Her PhD dissertation was entitled “Mitigating Blackouts via Smart Relays: A Machine Learning Approach” and it investigated how to mitigate future blackouts by using self-organized networking paradigms. Yi will continue her research at GE as a Research Scientist in the general area of 'Smart Grid'.

11/01/2010

Prof. Tonguz gave an Invited Talk at the prestigious Dagstuhl Seminar in Germany, in October 2010. The Dagstuhl Workshop on Vehicular Networks brought together key researchers in the hot research area of Vehicular Networks which has recently attracted a tremendous amount of attention from car manufacturers and academia. The emerging applications of vehicular networks include safety, traffic information systems, and entertainment. The Invited Talk delivered by Prof. Tonguz was entitled “Vehicular Networks: Principles and Applications”.

07/27/2010

Hsin-Mu (Michael) Tsai was extended an offer to join the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of National Taiwan University in Taiwan as a tenure-track Assistant Professor effective August 1, 2010. Michael was working on the Intra-Car Wireless Sensor Network project sponsored by General Motors under the supervision of Prof. Ozan Tonguz. National Taiwan University is considered to be one of the top 3 universities (many people consider it as Taiwan's top university) in Taiwan in the areas of computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

His new personal website can be found here.

02/18/2010

A paper published by Carnegie Mellon | Portugal ECE PhD student Mate Boban, ECE alum Geoff Misek and ECE Professor Ozan Tonguz was the second most accessed IEEE Globecom 2008 workshop paper in IEEE Xplore for December 2009. The paper, “What is the Best Achievable QoS for Unicast Routing in VANETs?,” evaluates the attainable performance of unicast routing protocols in future vehicular networks. Boban is now a second-year Information and Communications Technologies Institute PhD student working under the supervision of Tonguz and Associate Professor Joao Barros at the University of Porto.

A PDF of the most accessed papers is available here.

10/24/2008

A paper published by two former ECE PhD students Sooksan Panichpapiboon and Nawaporn Wisitpongphan of Professor Tonguz, Dr. Gianluigi Ferrari, and ECE Professor Ozan Tonguz is one of the top 100 papers accessed in the IEEE Xplore in the month of June 2008 [PDF]. The paper entitled “Route Reservation in Ad Hoc Wireless networks” was published in the January 2007 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

The paper investigates under which conditions (in terms of route discovery, MAC protocol, pipelining, etc.) reserving a route in ad hoc wireless networks might be superior compared to non-reservation based schemes. While most wired networks use non-reservation-based switching and communication paradigms such as packet switching, it is shown in the paper that certain real-time applications such as voice and video using a route-reservation based communication scheme might yield better performance in terms of delay. The paper also proposes a new queuing-theoretic model for investigating the performance of non-reservation based communications in ad hoc wireless networks.

Dr. Sooksan Panichpapiboon is now a faculty member in the School of Engineering of King Mongkut Institute of Technology in Thailand, while Dr. Wisitpongphan is a Research Associate in the R&D of General Motors in Detroit. Dr. Gianluigi Ferrari who was a postdoc in the research group of Prof. Tonguz at the time this work was done is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Parma in Italy.

The research reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from Cylab.

08/27/2008

Prof. Tonguz was recently invited to serve as the Managing Guest Editor of a Special Issue of AD HOC NETWORKS JOURNAL (Elsevier) on Vehicular Networks. The Special Issue aims to meet the growing research demand in vehicular ad hoc networks, a hot topic of great interest to car manufacturers and Departments of Transportation in the US and Europe. Two other General Motors researchers, Dr. Cem Saraydar and Dr. Fan Bai, will assist Prof. Tonguz as Guest Editors for making the Special Issue a major platform where the state-of-the-art research results of transportation industry and academia will be published. The Call For Papers for the Special Issue can be found here. The paper submission deadline for the Special Issue is December 1, 2008. For further information, please contact Prof. Tonguz.

08/13/2008

A recent CMU-GM paper published by Prof. Tonguz and his PhD student Hsin-Mu (Michael) Tsai in the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine in December 2007 made the TOP 10 ARTICLES list in the most accessed documents of IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine in the month of April 2008 [PDF]. The paper co-authored by GM researchers Cem Saraydar, Tim Talty, and Andrew Macdonald reports the results of a comprehensive experimental study on the use of ZigBee technology for building an intra-car wireless sensor network.

As the number of sensors used in contemporary cars are rapidly increasing, there is a growing interest in replacing the wires used to connect these sensors to the CAN network with wireless technology. It is anticipated that the success of this research effort could lead to: 1) an open network architecture for placing more sensors in future cars; 2) better fuel efficiency because of the reduction in weight of cars; 3) a possible reduction in the overall cost of cars.

12/30/2007

Dr. Tonguz will be chairing IEEE INFOCOM MOVE (MObile Networking for Vehicular Environments) Workshop 2008 in Phoenix, AZ, US on April 18, 2008. The workshop will include contributions focusing on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and networking. Please see the workshop website here.