The project for Calendar Year 2011 has 2 parts- wireless bridging and video transmission.  Arun Vejendla, a 4th year student for Bachelor of Information Technology, undertakes this project.  Edmond Chan, who holds a master degree in IT from the same university, is the supervisor.

a)      Testing of wireless bridges (based on a radio that we source from Taiwan) in various configurations to establish the performance specifications.  The product that we imported has 2 variants.  Model A is a wireless bridge and it consists of a radio and a flat panel antenna.  Model B is a radio only and it has the same housing as Model A but it does not have any built-in antenna inside the housing.  For Model B to work, we will need to connect it to an external antenna.  We have a choice of different form factors of external antenna such as omni or parabolic.  The radio has been certified to IEE 802.11n standards and is suitable for operation in 5GHZ spectrum.  The student is expected to test the wireless bridge in the workshop and real life environments, and to state the maximum performance and limitations of all versions.  We are aware that the bridge is capable of transmitting data at 80Mbps x 2 directions simultaneously over 2KM range on a line of sight.

b)      Investigation of the impact of video on data transmission on a local area network to establish some performance specifications.  Refer to Cisco MediaNet.  Our company has been involved in video for surveillance use.  One camera typically requires 3Mbps of bandwidth.  Suppose the surveillance system has 30, 60 and 90 cameras respectively, the video will have very substantial impact on any 100Mbps local area network.  The student is expected to provide guidelines to system administrators on how the video traffic should be managed.  Cisco MediaNet has special and proprietary firmware for managing video in data networks.  The student is expected to learn about MediaNet and recommend if we can use standard network switches to achieve the same purposes.