Welcome to the home page of the S⁴W project!

Project Summary

• This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9974956.
  • Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• Our project aims to push the envelope for tools used for reseach and deployment of wireless systems. Currently, we are working on the `Site-Specific System Simulator for Wireless Communications' (S⁴W). This state of the art tool will assist developers of wireless communication networks in the simulation of systems on a broader scale than is possible with current tools. The S⁴W system allows the user to seamlessly move between indorr and outdoor portions of the simulated wireless communication network. The S⁴W system will establish the future trend of wireless communication simulation tools.
• This work is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The abstract of the research proposal filed with the NSF can be found here.
• Specific details about the S⁴W project can be found here.

Who we are

• We are an interdisciplinary group of electrical engineers and computer scientists working on wireless communication systems of the future. The S⁴W project is a collaboration between the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group (MPRG) of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. Our goal is to design a comprehensive design and support system, called `Site-Specific System Simulator for Wireless Communications' (S⁴W). The work is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The abstract of the research proposal can be found here.

Affiliated Faculty

• Ted Rappaport (ECE)
• Naren Ramakrishnan (CS)
• Clifford Shaffer (CS)
• Bill Tranter (ECE)
• Layne Watson (CS)

Graduate Students

• Kyung Kyoon Bae (ECE)
• Jing Jiang (ECE)
• Srihari Raghavan (CS)
• Erik Rubin (CS)
• Praveen Sheetha (ECE)

Related Projects 

• The PYTHIA project - Recommender system for solving PDEs
• Sieve - Collaborative environment for interactive design, visualization, and data analysis

Meeting minutes (Restricted to .vt domain)

• December 16, 1999
• January 27, 2000
• April 13, 2000
• April 20, 2000
• April 27, 2000
• May 13, 2000

Useful links

• WISE tool from AT&T http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/wise/index.html
  • Paper concerning the WISE tool: http://computer.org/cise/cs1995/c1058abs.htm
• URL discussing Fast Computational Techniques for Indoor Radio Channel Estimation
• Powerpoint presentation on conversion utilities for various DEM formats. This is useful for anyone interested in working with Digital Elevation Model (DEM) format files.
• Dem-file Finder: http://www.pes.com/pes/demprog.html This is an interactive program that comes in very handy for GIS people and environmental scientists. Simply fill out the Latitude and Longitude of the site for which you need 1-degree DEM data. The DEM file name will be displayed. One can then go to the US Geological Survey (USGS) site to get the DEM.
• 7.5 Minute DEM http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/gis/24kdem.html

  Each 7.5 minute unit of DEM coverage(based on the 7.5 minute quadrangle) consists of a regular array of elevations referenced horizontally in the UTM projection co-ordinate system.

• Natural Scene Designer http://naturalgfx.com/nsdwin98.html

  Partial feature list:

  • Built in rock, tree, and bush generators

    Creates color shaded relief maps

    Imports USGS DEMs, SDTS, GTOPO 30, and grayscale DEMs

    Exports landscapes as USGS DEMs, DXF, 3DMF and grayscale files

    Creates QuickTime VR 360 degree panoramas

    Lets you import, position, and render QuickDraw 3D (3DMF) objects

    Saves animations as QuickTime movies

    Lets you combine adjacent terrain models

    Saves pictures as BMP or TIFF in 8 or 24-bit color

    Adjustable resolution and color

    Cost ~ 200$

   

• KPT BRYCE 4.0 / LandSerf http://www.metacreations.com/products/bryce4/
  • Can take in .DEM and .DDF (SDTS) and also .WRL(VRML) among host of other inputs

    Outputs 3dStudio(.3ds), autocad (.DXF) , .PGM,.DEM, .WRL among others..includes 2D outputs and animation outputs

    LandSerf- DEM to ArcInfo TIN format and the other way around

    TIN generation/interpolation (TIN-Triangulated Irregular Networks)

    Fractal surface generation

    http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/jwo/research/LandSerf/landserf17/doc/index.html

   

• Frogis company’s software http://www.frogis.com/services.html
  • Conversion services include:

    Converting DEMs to various projections

    Foot to Meter

    NAD to NAD

    Change Projection

    Convert from STDS, cdo. or CorpsCom to an ZYX format.

    Merge multiple DEM files into one continuos DEM.

   

• http://members.xoom.com/bongkf/
• http://www.microimages.com/product/tntmips.htm

  Input formats- TARGA,TIFF, PCX, SPOT, LANDSAT, ARC/Info, DXF, MOSS,DLG,DGN,DEM,GRASS, TIGER etc..

• http://www.ora.com/centers/gff/gff-faq/gff-faq1.htm
• http://www.bbk.ac.uk/geog/toppage8.htm
• http://home.i1.net/~jamoyers/kdem/
• http://www.whitestar.com/
• http://instruction.ferris.edu/thapak/carto.html
• http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0799/webdata6.html

   

Site maintained by Erik Rubin errubin@vt.edu