The IEEE Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services (WONS) conference has been the home of a small community of wireless connectivity researchers for the past 17 years. Each year, the event welcomes roughly fifty participants for three days of exchange over their latest research.
The focus of the conference, wireless on-demand network systems, began as a niche application that was mainly used over Wi-Fi. Over the past fifteen years, this particular type of network connectivity has grown to become a cornerstone of Bluetooth, LTE Direct, Internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and much more. SnT’s Prof. Dr Raphaël Frank is the General Chair of the 2021 WONS Conference, which took place on 9-11th March. We spoke to him about the community and the researchers who publish there.
First things first, what are “Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services”?
Frank: The concept is pretty straightforward. The key feature of this type of network is that it isn’t permanently connected. It is a network that only operates when a device requests a connection. If you used a wireless Bluetooth device today — maybe headphones or a mouse — then you activated a very simple wireless on-demand network. Today, hot topics in this research field include 5G, visible light communications, and vehicular communications to name just a few.
These networks must be absolutely everywhere then.
Well, they are certainly becoming a lot more common. They used to be a somewhat unusual set-up that was only useful in specific situations. They have always been important for direct communication between mobile devices. As the number of mobile and connected devices has increased, these networks are becoming more and more common. Personally, I find their application in automated driving most interesting. In a self-driving car, you depend on timely and reliable data from other cars — from your neighbors on the road. Being able to establish and operate these vehicular networks reliably is critical to the future of automated transportation.
Is that how you first came to the WONS conference? Through your interest in connected driving?
Well, sort of. I was introduced to the conference by one of my PhD thesis advisors, Mario Gerla at UCLA. We were looking at vehicular networks at the time. So, not self-driving cars, but cars that were a lot more connected and “smart” than the vehicles on the road at the time [2009]. Actually, one of my most cited papers was originally published at the WONS conference, and it is about vehicular networks. But it would be more correct to say that it was Mario who brought me to WONS, and WONS that led me towards connected and automated driving.
Prof. Dr Mario Gerla – photo credit: Carla Richmond Coffing
Can you tell us a bit more about Prof. Gerla and his work? I understand that he was the original founder of the WONS conference and that he passed away in 2019.
Yes. Prof. Dr Gerla — Mario — co-initiated the WONS conference in 2004. He was born in Italy and earned his Master’s degree in Milan, but emigrated to the States in the 60s. He had a stellar career, and ultimately became the chair of the Computer Science Department at UCLA. Mario really created a community around him, and WONS was just one expression of that. He was an avid traveller — very proud of the fact he had been to all seven continents — and a tri-athlete too! For him, WONS was an opportunity to bring together a lot of these important aspects of his life: his research, his European and American colleagues, and his deep love of the outdoors. He made a point of organising the conference every year somewhere where we could spend time with each other outside of the venue, too. As a result, our community grew very tight-knit. We understood the sorts of questions we each wanted to answer, and it fostered a lot of really wonderful research collaborations.
I’m very sorry for your loss. The community must feel his absence deeply.
Thank you. We do. The year Mario died, WONS actually didn’t take place. Many of us, however, were together that year at Mario’s memorial at UCLA in California. We all wanted to make sure the conference continued to happen. Mario’s work was too important to our community for it to just end. I’m very glad that we can all honour his memory by keeping the community alive through his conference.
But 2020 was quite a year to have to organize your first conference! How has the Coronavirus crisis impacted everything?
When I first agreed to be the General Chair, it was December 2019 — weeks before the crisis hit Europe. At that time, we all thought things would be back to normal by the time the conference rolled around in March 2021. So in the beginning, I kept planning for the conference to take place in Switzerland. We did, of course, ultimately have to pivot to a virtual conference, and I was nervous about the change because WONS is really about the community. But we got a lot of submissions, and we even had more participants than usual!
How does a virtual conference work?
We used Zoom for presentations, keynotes, talks, breakout groups, those sorts of things. To encourage discussions, we also used GatherTown, a virtual environment that looks like an old-school video game. Each participant had a little pixelated avatar they could control with their keyboard — and when they “walked up” to someone else’s avatar, a video connection opened. They could just walk up to a group and join the conversation, just like they would over coffee between sessions. It helped foster some of that community feeling we’ve all gotten accustomed to. We even “decorated” the virtual environment to make it look like the ski region in Switzerland where we originally wanted to meet.
Are there any upsides to the virtual conference?
Oh, absolutely. It was a lot easier for PhD students to participate — they didn’t need to have a travel budget to attend. In fact, PhD students didn’t need to pay any fee at all to attend our virtual conference. That’s brought a lot more diverse, young minds to our group this year. I’m excited to see what this fresh group will bring to the event! It will be rewarding to bring a new generation into the community Mario left us.