David Johnson

PhD Candidate

Department of Computer Science
University of California
Santa Barbara, California 93106

Senior researcher
Meraka Institute
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Pretoria, South Africa

M.Eng in Computer Engineering
University of Pretoria, South Africa

Current Research Interests :

Rural Wireless Networks

Cognitive radios and white spaces

Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless testbeds

davidj AT cs.ucsb.edu

David Johnson was born in South Africa in 1972. He received his B.Sc. (Electronic Engineering) at Cape Town University ( South Africa) in 1995 and completed his M.Eng in Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) in 2007 on scaled wireless grids for benchmarking ad hoc routing protocols. David has been working in the field of wireless mesh networks for the past 4 years and in Telecommunications Engineering for the past 8 years where he previously designed Bluetooth and GSM telemetry systems for sport. He is currently studying towards a PhD at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the field of rural wireless mesh networks and is part of the Moment lab at UCSB. He is also a senior researcher at the Meraka Institute in Pretoria where he leads a research team attempting to solve some of the fundamental research challenges behind bringing wireless connectivity to deep rural areas. David has pioneered the first rural wireless mesh network in South Africa in Peebles Valley as well as helping with the design of the Linknet rural wireless network in Zambia. He was also involved in designing and building one of the worlds only 3 indoor scaled wireless grid testbeds at the Meraka Institute in South Africa. He has published on Mesh Networks in journals such as "Ad-hoc networks" and MONET, a number of IEEE and ACM conferences as well as serving on the TPC for the Extremecom conference.