Dr. Oleksandr Artemenko is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Ilmenau (Ilmenau, Germany). His research interests include Computer networks security Information and Communication Technology. He won the ‘Best Paper’ award at ADHOCNETS 2014, the International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks that took place in Rhodes, Greece. In our interview, he talked to us about the biggest challenges in Ad Hoc Networks and in which way his paper contributes in his research field.
In your opinion, what were the most innovative issues discussed at ADHOCHNETS 2014?
The conference is very focused on ad hoc networking. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how broad and diverse the research applications presented at ADHOCNETS 2014 are. The talks, given by the participants, touched many open research questions feeding our discussions during and after technical sessions. However, one important issue was present in almost every topic raised during the conference, whether in vehicular mobile networks or smart grids, in routing or cognitive radio: complex, flexible, dynamic networks of mobile users with unpredictable and unstable behavior represent the most challenging issues. Such networks cannot be controlled by a single entity anymore and thus require self-organization, autonomy, distributed decisions and implicit coordination. With a continuous growth of the number of devices and user demands, this problem will motivate researchers around the globe to look for innovative and groundbreaking solutions.
What is the biggest challenge for researchers in your research field nowadays?
As many academic researchers work on networks of unmanned aerial vehicles, our group is focusing on the design of innovative solutions that can support the society in various ways – monitoring, safety, rescue, entertainment, etc. However, it is a challenge to keep up with the up-to-date trends in the technology. This doesn’t necessarily mean staying behind the progress but rather being sometimes too innovative for the current industry standards. To be successful, you need to find a fine balance, a “golden ratio” between theory and practice. To support the applicability of own solutions, researchers need to invest a lot of time in testing and evaluating their approaches on real hardware platforms. However, the current unmanned aerial vehicles available on the market do not offer many opportunities. Often scientists have to develop their own platforms, which can be very time consuming.
Your paper won the Best Paper Award at ADHOCNETS 2014. What was the main contribution of ‘Validation and Evaluation of the Chosen Path Planning Algorithm for Localization of Nodes Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in Disaster Scenarios’ to the field?
Our paper represents one of the first attempts to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the performance of the well-known trajectory planning approach for the path planning of flying vehicles using not only simulations but real experiments. The main contribution is represented by the unique scenario conditions (e.g., tight time constraints, walls between emitters and receivers) defined by a disastrous event as well as by the simulative and experimental evaluation using a real unmanned aerial vehicle. Furthermore, having a long time experience in working with different types of flying vehicles, we always make the raw data that we collect in our experiments publically available to provide other researchers an opportunity to test their algorithms using real data (http://bit.ly/1JCRtKm). We hope that our example will inspire other researchers to share their experience and data with the community that can result in a fruitful collaboration.
