We currently have 2 open Graduate Assistantship (GA) positions in the UNH Wireless Research Group (WRG) starting in September 2013.  These assistantships are competitive and are only available for talented and qualified students who are interested in wireless research and who would like to pursue their research in Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.  To qualify for these GA positions, applicants must have high undergraduate cumulative Grade Point Averages (GPA) with experience in the development of C/C++ and in one of the simulation areas: Matlab, MultiSim, OPNET, or NS2.  International applicants must also meet the University’s English language requirement to qualify for these GA positions.  For more information, please contact me at aesmailpour@newhaven.edu

• For information on other graduate engineering funding options at UNH, please contact the Graduate Admissions Office at www.newhaven.edu/admissions/gradadmissions/

• Welcome to our new homepage!
• Meet the Team

Dr. Amir Esmailpour is currently a professor at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (ECECS) in the University of New Haven (UNH), where he is teaching computer and networking courses, while conducting research in the 4^th Generation (4G) of wireless networks such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX).

Before coming to the UNH, Amir was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. He received his PhD at the faculty of Engineering and Computer Science in the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Canada, and Masters and Bachelor degrees from Ryerson University, Toronto, and University of Ottawa, Ottawa, both in Canada respectively.  Amir has several years of experience in research and teaching in university and colleges across Canada and the United States. Prior to returning to academic work, he also had several years of experience in the industry, working for companies such as Nortel Networks, Daimler Chrysler, and so on.

Amir has several published papers in the internationally reputable publications such as IEEE journals, magazines, and conferences. He has also voluntarily refereed for 100+ of papers in the same journals and conferences. Amir held several Canadian national, provincial and industrial awards and scholarships during his academic and professional experience such as Canadian prestige’s NSERC. In addition to his University education, he also holds several industrial certifications such as Microsoft Corporation, Cisco Systems, and Nortel Networks certifications.

Amir’s research interests are focused in various areas of networking and wireless communication, such as next generation of wireless networks, LTE, WiMAX radio resource management, quality of service, routing and so on. He also has strong industrial affiliations with companies such as Ericsson, Cisco, RIM and so on, in addition to strong desire for research and teaching.

• Postdoctoral Fellow (PDF), department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE),  University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
• PhD, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Guelph, Canada, 2010
• Master of Applied Science, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Networks, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, 2006
• Bachelor of Science with Honors, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada, 2000
• Diploma in Network Security, Willis College of Business & Technology, Ottawa, Canada, 2002
• Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE) for Windows Network Operating System, 2002
• Cisco Certified Network Administrator (CCNA), CCIE candidate, 2002
• Nortel Certified for Synchronize Optical Networks Administrator (SONET), 2000

Dr. Esmailpour teaches the following courses. The first list is his specialization in the past few years and frequently taught. The next two lists are other computer science and mathematics courses of interests.

Specialized and Recently Taught Courses

1. Advanced Wireless Communications and Networking
2. Wireless Communications and Networking
3. Fundamentals of Networking (OSI and TCP/IP layers)
4. Advanced Networking I (Layer 2 Switching Technologies)
5. Advanced Networking II (Layer 3 Routing Technologies)
6. C/C++ Programming Language
7. Wired and Wireless Network Security
8. Servers (Mail, Web, File, Security, AAA, Proxy, Active Directory) using different platforms (Microsoft Windows 2000-2008 and Linux Servers)
9. Cisco Routing and Switching
10. Linux Administration  
11. Fiber Optics and SONET technology
12. Fundamentals of Computer Hardware and Software

Other Computer Science Courses

1. Introduction to Computer Science and Computer Organizations
2. Computer Programming Language (C/C++/Java)
3. Data structures
4. Introduction to Software Engineering
5. Computer Architecture
6. Operating Systems
7. Computer Simulation and Modeling
8. Databases and Database Management System
9. Logic Design of Digital Systems
10. Introduction to Algorithms and Complexity
11. Introduction to Human Computer Interactions

Mathematics Courses

1. Calculus
2. Algebra
3. Differential Equations
4. Mathematic Logics
5. Discrete Mathematics
6. Probability and statistics

Teaching Philosophy

I believe that teaching skill is an integral part of academic work that should be established based on five main principles: dedication, encouragement, engagement, research, and fun. I have always built my teaching skills based on these five rules:

• Dedication is what gives the student the confident that they can rely on to get credible and meaningful resources for knowledge. A dedicated teacher goes beyond the minimum requirement, and starts preparation for the course several months before the course is to be delivered. Every year updates the teaching material, and every day of the lecture, reviews the material before the class, and makes observation notes after the class to make improvements for the next class and next year.
• Encouragement is what makes the wheels rolling on their own; it is like the first push of a spaceship out of the earth gravity. A philosopher once said that encouragement is 9/10 of teaching. The capacity and potential of the young minds are beyond imagination, all we need to do is to inspire the minds and direct them in the right path, and then their learning speed exceeds far beyond our expectations.
• Engagement is the glue that sticks the student to the material. Students from all intellectual ability and hardworking levels need to feel integrated by showing their instincts. By engaging them in the material, we can open the floor for them to show their contribution and importance.
• Research makes the academic work interesting rather than boring; looking for new ideas, searching the unknown is in the human nature. In any graduate as well as undergraduate course, make research an integral part of the class material, and part of evaluation.
• Fun is needed for studying, just like every other part of life. Fun is the glue that sticks the student to the classroom. Students should feel comfortable in class, and be sure they can have access to instructor outside the class, so they are not stressed that if they miss something, they have no chance to catch up later. Use frequent or open breaks, and make the class flexible. These will make the classroom a much more pleasant place for the students.

Dr. Amir Esmailpour’s research interests are mostly in different areas of wired and wireless networking, with special focus on TCP/IP stacks, IP networking, Routing, Switching, Radio Resource Management, Quality of Service Provisioning, and Performance Evaluation of Communication Networks, Protocols and Algorithms. Amir has special interest in wireless networks such as Wireless LAN (the IEEE 802.11), WiMAX (the IEEE 802.16), Long Term Evolution (LTE), and working towards fourth generation (4G) of wireless mobile networks. These works are performed on several layers of TCP/IP stack such as Transport, Network, MAC, and cross-layer design.  His current research areas include:

• 3GPP Long Term Evolution
• WiMAX Networks
• Wireless Mesh Networks
• Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
• Wireless Sensor Networks
• IP Networking, TCP/IP protocols
• Heterogeneous Wireless Data Networks
• Mobile, Multi-hop, and Multi-path Wireless Networks
• All-IP 4^th Generation (4G) of Wireless Networks
• Routing Protocols for 4G wireless technologies
• Radio Resource Management and Quality of Service for 4G wireless technologies
• Wireless Networks System Integration, such as combining  WLAN, WiMAX, or Ad-hoc networks with Cellular network

Research Background

Radio Resource Management (RRM) and Quality of Service (QoS) support play crucial roles in the next generation (4th Generation or 4G) of wireless communication and wireless networks.  Contending technologies in 4G such as LTE and WiMAX have a wide range of practical applications, which has generated a great deal of interest in the Industry. In the academia, they have also stimulated an active area of research with numerous challenging problems to solve. Both the IEEE and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have allocated groups on standardizing technologies and protocols for 4G. 

Motivation

RRM and QoS support for the 4G technologies, including Packet Scheduling (PS), Bandwidth Allocation (BA) and Call Admission Control (CAC) are the focus of many research groups. I have surveyed and gathered information on numerous PS, BA and CAC schemes, and analyzed design of proposed schemes and their performances. Most researchers focus on traditional RRM schemes by modifying and combining them to work more efficiently. Those schemes often manage to improve performance of the networks by increasing QoS parameters such as throughput or decreasing delay. However, new wireless and multimedia application users have more complicated demands such as QoS differentiation, prioritization, and fairness. We need to create parameters to be able to measure QoS differentiation and perform comparison analysis between QoS differentiation of various real time and non-real time applications. These studies have led us to the idea that new RRM schemes are required to dynamically change resource allocation based on the new set of QoS demands.

Research Tools

Most of the research that I have been doing are verified and tested using software simulated tools such as C/C++ programming environment, Network Simulator-version 2 (NS-2), OPNET network simulator, J-SIM, Java-Simulator, and so on. Depending on the University budget and research grants, we could extend the results by creating test-bed environment using real equipment, such as wireless Base Station, Access Points, Routers, and Switches to investigate the results.

Journal Papers:

1. N. Nasser, A. Esmailpour, R. Miller, "A Utility-Based Framework for the Quality of Service in Wireless Broadband Networks", Submitted to The IEEE transaction journal on Wireless Communication 2011
2. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, “A Framework for the Quality of Service Support in WiMAX Networks”.  Published in the IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technologies, 2011.
3. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, T. Taleb. “Topological based Architecture for Wireless Mesh Networks”.  Published in the IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine 2010.
4. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, “Efficient Routing System for Wireless Mesh Networks using an ad-hoc Alternative Path”.  Accepted to appear in the Wiley International Journal of Communication Systems (IJCS-2011), summer of 2011.
5. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, “A Backup Routing Scheme for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks”. Published in the International Journal on Information and Communication Technology, September 2009.

Conference Papers:

1. A. Esmailpour, D. Eggert, and N. Nasser, "Tutorial on The Evolution of the 4th Generation of Wireless Network Technologies" submitted to the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2012) Ottawa, Canada.
2. N. Nasser, R. Miller, A. Esmailpour. “Optimal Utility-Based Bandwidth Allocation in WiMAX Networks”, The International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2011) 
3. M. Gracias, V. Knezevic, and A. Esmailpour, “Interoperability between WiMAX and WiFi in a Testbed Environment”, The 24th IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE 2011)
4. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, “A Novel Scheme for Packet Scheduling and Bandwidth Allocation in WiMAX Networks”. The IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC  2011)
5. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser. “Quantifying Quality of Service Differentiation for WiMAX Networks”.  International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Information Technology (MCIT-2010)
6. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, “Packet Scheduling Scheme with Quality of Service Support for Mobile WiMAX Networks”.    The 34th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2009), October 2009, Zürich, Switzerland
7. A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser, and Bahram Z. Azami, “A Cross-Layer Design Solution for Performance Improvement of      Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks”, Proceedings of Int. Conference on Electrical and Electronic Engineering (ICEE), Tehran, Iran, May 2008
8. A. Esmailpour, M. Jaseemuddin, N. Nasser, and O. Bazan. “Ad-hoc Path: an Alternative to Backbone for Wireless Mesh Networks”. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Glasgow, U.K., pp. 24-28 June, 2007
9.  A. Esmailpour, N. Nasser. “Throughput Improvement for Wireless Mobile Ad-hoc Networks”. Proceedings of  Int. Conference on Electrical and Electronic Engineering (ICEE)  , Tehran, Iran, Summer 2007
10. J. Wu, M. Jaseemuddin, and A. Esmailpour. “Integrating UMTS and Ad Hoc Networks”. Proceedings of IEEE Int. Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications  (WiMob 2006), Montreal, Canada, August, 2006
11.  M. Jaseemuddin, A. Esmailpour, A. Alwan, and O. Bazan. “Integrated Routing System for Wireless Mesh Networks”. Proceedings of IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE), Ottawa, May 2006

Industrial Research Papers:

1. Amir Esmailpour, “IP Traffic Patterns, Characterization, and TCP/IP behavior”, Nortel Networks publications
2. Amir Esmailpour, Jenny McCloskey, DEN and Policy based Networking; directory enabled networking, Nortel Networks publications
3. Amir Esmailpour, Michael Reece.  “10Gbps Ethernet solution for Long haul and Metropolitan applications”. Nortel Networks publications
4. Michael Reece, Amir Esmailpour.  “A comparison between Mesh Versus Ring Restoration”.  Nortel Networks publications
5. Amir Esmailpour, Jenny McCloskey. “ISP POP Architecture: An overview of common POP architectures employed by major ISPs worldwide (ATM versus IP based architectures). Nortel Networks publications

The UNHwRG is a research group under the supervision of Dr. Amir Esmailpour, within the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (ECECS) at the University of New Haven, West Haven, CT. We, at the UNHwRG, conduct state-of-the-art research in different areas of wireless communication and wireless networking. 

Our general direction of research is mostly in various topics around wired and wireless networking, with special focus on Routing, Radio Resource Management (RRM), Quality of Service (QoS) Provisioning, and Performance Evaluation of communication networks, protocols and algorithms.  We have special interest in wireless technologies such as Wireless LAN (the IEEE 802.11 standard), WiMAX (the IEEE 802.16 standard), the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), and working towards the fourth generation (4G) of wireless mobile technologies.

We are performing analytical, experimental, and practical research studies in our laboratory facilities to investigate various open research topics, related issues and possible solutions in design and development of new technologies and protocols related to various wireless networks. We are constantly monitoring new activities in the industry as well as research community around the world in this area of research, exploring new ideas, and investigating existing issues. Our normal activities involve working on design and development of new solutions, experimenting, verifying, and testing them in simulation environment and publishing our results in reputable publications such as the IEEE conferences and journals.

The current interest of our research team is in RRM, QoS support, and Security for LTE and WiMAX technologies, both of which are designated by the ITU as potential contending 4G (the 4^th Generation of Wireless technologies) networks. We are investigating existing and proposed solutions for RRM and QoS in LTE, and working towards design and development of solutions to improve the performance of these networks. Our proposed solutions are based on the 3GPP and the IEEE standards, and implementations are in Physical, MAC, and Application layers, as well as cross-layer design.

Although our current research focus is in the areas mentioned above, but we have been conducting research in the past and are open to good ideas in other wired and wireless research areas including but not limited to the following list.

• 3GPP Long Term Evolution (3GPP LTE standard)
• WiMAX Networks (the IEEE 802.16 standard)
• Wireless Mesh Networks (the IEEE 802.11 standard)
• Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (the IEEE 802.11 standard)
• Wireless Sensor Networks
• Wireless Security issues in Wireless Mesh and WiMAX networks
• Heterogeneous Wireless Data Networks
• Mobile, Multi-hop, and Multi-path Wireless Networks
• All-IP 4^th Generation (4G) of Wireless Networks
• Routing Protocols for 4G wireless technologies
• Radio Resource Management and Quality of Service for 4G wireless technologies
• Wireless Networks System Integration, such as combining  WLAN and WiMAX networks, or Ad-hoc with Cellular networks
• TCP/IP Networking
• Routing performance analysis, especially in OSPF and BGP
• BGP fault analysis

Dr. Esmailpour directs the UNHwRG research activities with the current students, previous students as well as fellow researchers from other universities including The University of Toronto, Ryerson University, The University of Guelph, and others.

If you have passion for research in different areas of wired and wireless networking, regardless of your location or the academic institution, we encourage you to contact us for cooperation. We love to conduct joint projects and research activities with fellow colleagues from institutions all over the world.