Rice’s University’s WARP is a scalable and extensible programmable wireless platform, built from the ground up, to prototype advanced wireless networks.

Rice University’s Networks Group has partnered with Technology For All (TFA) to deploy a multi-tier wireless network in an under-resourced community in Houston’s East End.  More Details

Projects

Efficient Wireless Systems - Wireless broadband access from mobile systems is among the largest system power consumers.  In this project, we aim at improving its energy efficiency while meeting performance constraints.  Our approach is system and we study solutions that can be implemented in wireless network interface card (WNIC) and software in a mostly standard-compliant manner.  Lin Zhong, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Husheng Li

Pecan Park Project - We have conducted a long-term holistic field study with 14 teens from the Pecan Park neighborhood.  We gave the participants state of the art Wi-Fi capable phones, allowing them to access the Rice -TFA open 802.11 network in the community for free. To gather quantitative data, we converted commercial  Pocket PC phones into experimental phones by developing software to continuously log information related to phone usage, context, and network conditions in a privacy-respecting manner.  To gather qualitative data, we conducted regular focus groups and interviews. 

Our findings highlight the values phones provide for ICT access and provide insight into the design and evaluation of mobile phones and services.  Ahmad Rahmati