Group #

11

Week ending: (Saturday)

11/05/05

Report #

8

Project Title:

Aloha: Simulation and Critique of a Random Access Method

Group Leader:

Michelle Teixeira

Advisor:

Prof. Tureli

Sponsor/Client:

Total number of person-hours spent on project by group during past week:

36 person-hours

Is project on schedule?

Yes

[ X ]

No

[  ]

Weekly status:

Include discussion of what you accomplished this week, who you contacted, what decisions were made, what obstacles were identified, how they are being addressed.

This week completed the eighth full week we have been working on our Senior Design Project.  This week:

· We had our usual group discussion, where we talked about our progress, the website, problems with the simulation, and future steps to be taken in our project

· The main issue we discussed this week is the future of our project.  We talked about where we are going to go with our idea.  We understand that it’s mostly a research project.  Some ideas we talked about were possibly incorporating characteristics/code of various existing random access protocols into our version of Aloha, in the hopes of creating a simple, more efficient communications protocol.

· Work on the simulation of Aloha is a continuous progress.  As mentioned before, we are trying to run simulations on Matlab, Simulink and Opnet.  Currently, we are most concerned with Matlab though, since it appears to be the simplest program to use.  However, we have encountered some problems with the code.  It's not producing the desired output and, frankly, we think the code is wrong.  We spoke with Tureli about the situation on Friday.  He has suggested working with a grad student.  We will be discussing this with him this upcoming Tuesday.

· This week we started putting up the basic information up on our website.  One team member is handling the details for it.  She has put up the weekly report, the project proposal, and some links that we have deemed important, as well as interesting.

· This week we also began discussing the final design report and the presentation.  We looked over the requirements and we started throwing out ideas as to what we should include in the final presentation.  This upcoming week we will be assigning responsibilities to each team member with respect to the paper.

· We also talked about the parts list that is due at the end of the semester.  Currently, the only parts we need are software packages, such as Matlab.  We only have the student version and we feel that may hinder us.  We think that the professional version is essential and would be a great help.