Magnitude 7.2, Baja California, April 4, 2010

HPWREN sent around an interesting link from NEES@UCSB about the Magnitude 7.2 earthquake in Baja, California on April 4, 2010. The story is by Hank Ratzesberger, Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES).

Caption for image above: Ground and downhole acceleration was recorded at depths of 5.5, 8.5, 30 and 100 meters. The Wildlife and other sites operated by NEES@UCSB are among a handful of sites with dense instrumentation at strategic soil layer depths. Highly instrumented and thoroughly characterized, the sites provide a laboratory to test modeling of soil and seismic wave properties.

Wireless Research Featured in Technology Review

The "taking the Why out of Wi-Fi" research (see post below) landed on the front of the Technlogy Review page this week. Check out the story here


Watching Wi-Fi: This schematic illustrates the Wi-Fi access points (in red) and the radios (in black) that monitor traffic in the computer-science building at UCSD. Below: two traffic-monitoring radios on a wall. Credit: University of California, San Diego

Taking the Why out of Wireless

"People expect WiFi to work, but there is also a general understanding that it’s just kind of flakey,” said Stefan Savage, one of the UCSD computer science professors who led development of an automated, enterprise-scale WiFi troubleshooting system for UCSD’s computer science building. The system is described in a paper presented last week in Kyoto, Japan at ACM SIGCOMM, one of the world’s premier networking conferences.


“If you have a wireless problem in our building, our system automatically analyzes the behavior of your connection – each wireless protocol, each wired network service and the many interactions between them. In the end, we can say ‘it’s because of this that your wireless is slow or has stopped working’ – and we can tell you immediately,” said Savage.

"Our system is the ultimate laboratory for testing new wireless gadgets and new approaches to building wireless systems. We just started looking at WiFi-based Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phones," Savage said.

You can read more about this here.

Stefan Savage is a UCSD computer science professorand one of the leaders of the UCSD wireless monitoring project.