Prof. Belding is the director of the Mobility Management and Networking (MOMENT) Lab. Currently, there are two primary research emphases of the Lab. The first of these is deployment, measurement, and modeling of wireless networks. The MOMENT group has created a wireless mesh testbed at UCSB, called the UCSB MeshNet, for the purpose of rapid prototyping of solutions, monitoring of user behavior, and studying wireless network deployment issues. Also under this project and together with Prof. Kevin Almeroth, the MOMENT group has monitored the wireless network performance of the 60th, 61st, 62nd and 64th IETF meetings. We have collected over 100GB of data on traffic and user movement, and are currently analyzing the data and developing models that represent user behavior.  Our analyses of this data have discovered a number of undesirable behaviors of IEEE 802.11 and other protocols in congested networks.  Part of our work is to develop new solutions that improve network performance.

The second research emphasis of the MOMENT Lab is on the development of wireless network solutions suitable to the constraints of developing and underdeveloped regions of the world, such as rural Africa.  The technological revolution of the past few decades has created a digital divide that separates the affluent and developed nations from the developing and under-developed regions of the world.  This digital divide has also widened the gap in economic divisions.  The goal of our research is to develop inexpensive, self-configuring, self-monitoring and self-sustaining mesh network communication solutions that are robust to power outages and can support a multitude of real-time voice and video traffic.  While we seek to develop solutions applicable to all developing regions, we focus our attention specifically on Africa to leverage our partnership with the Meraka Institute in South Africa. Our solutions include MAC and network layer protocols, power prediction models and conservation techniques, and lightweight scalable monitoring and adaptation systems.

A recent research emphasis of the MOMENT Lab is Quality of Service support for mobile networks. We have developed a number of solutions that support both higher quality and more concurrent multimedia and voice streams in mobile and mesh networks. We have completed a number of projects related to this area, including projects at the MAC and network layers. We have leveraged the UCSB Meshnet testbed for the characterization and analysis of our solutions.

For more information on any of these projects, visit the MOMENT Lab Webpage.