Thomas Little
ERC Associate Director and NSF/BU Site Coordinator
Testbed Leader, Outdoor Communications and Transportation
Faculty Investigator, Visual Light Communications
Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Associate Dean of Educational Initiatives (ENG)
Boston University
617-353-9877
tdcl @ bu.edu
Thomas Little is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Principal Investigator, and Associate Director of the NSF Smart Lighting ERC. Little oversees the Boston University effort of the grant as Site Coordinator and is also the Outdoor Communications and Transportation Testbed Leader.
Professor Little’s research focus in the grant is in the Systems area – in the adaptation of novel LED-based materials and devices for the support of visible-light-based communication and communications networking. By exploiting the ubiquity of future man-made lighting from solid state (LED) devices we anticipate ubiquitous network connectivity. Little’s research is directed at the intersection of networking, free-space optical communications, and the “anywhere” computing that they enable. Examples include supporting “trickle” data dissemination in sensor networks, achieving HD video streaming in high bandwidth-density scenarios such as aircraft seating, and improving vehicular safety via robust vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
Related Publications:
A.M. Vegni and T.D.C. Little, “A Message Propagation Model for Hybrid Vehicular Communication Protocols,” in Proc. 2nd Intl. Workshop on Communication Technologies for Vehicles (Nets4Cars), in the 7th IEEE Int. Symp. on Communication Systems, Networks and DSP, (CSNDSP 2010), Newcastle, UK, July 2010.
Z. Wu and T.D.C. Little, “Network Solutions for the LOS Problem of New Indoor Free Space Optical System,” in Proc. IEEE, IEE Intl. Symp. on Communciations Systems, Networks, and Digital Signal Processing 2010, Newcastle, UK, July 2010.
J. Chau, K. Matarese, and T.D.C. Little, “IP-Enabled LED Lighting Supporting Indoor Mobile and Wireless Communications,” Poster and Demonstration Program, MobiSys 2010, San Francisco, CA, June 15, 2010.
A. Agarwal and T.D.C. Little, “Role of Directional Wireless Communication in Vehicular Networks,” in Proc. Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV’10), San Diego, CA, June 2010.
A.M. Vegni, C. Vegni, and T.D.C. Little, “Opportunistic Vehicular Networks by Satellite Links for Safety Applications,” in Proc. of the Fully Networked Car Workshop, Geneva International Motor Show, Geneva, Switzerland, March 3-4, 2010.
T.D.C. Little, P. Dib, K. Shah, N. Barraford, and B. Gallagher, “Using LED Lighting for Ubiquitous Indoor Wireless Networking,” to appear at the 4th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob 2008) October, 2008, Avignon, France.
T.D.C. Little and A. Agarwal “Connecting Vehicles to ‘The Grid,’” Proc. NITRD National Workshop on High-Confidence Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems, April 3-4, 2008, Troy, MI.
A. Agarwal, D Starobinski, and T.D.C. Little, “Exploiting Downstream Mobility to Achieve Fast Upstream Message Propagation in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks,” Proc. Mobile Networking for Vehicular Environments 2007, Infocom 2007, Anchorage, AK, May 2007.
A. Agarwal and T.D.C. Little, “Prospects for Networked Vehicles of the Future,” Proc. Workshop on Smart Transportation, 13th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, Bellevue, WA, April 2007.
