Extending the Scope of
CyberInfrastructure With Broadband Wireless
What is iTiger
iTiger is a set of web-based services aimed at mobile devices to enhance the Clemson experience in sports, academics, and
around campus. Features will include instant replays and real-time player stats for football games, classroom tools, tools to
aid local law enforcement for public safety, and much more.
In addition to serving the campus and nearby community, this project will research network traffic and scalability, prioritized
transmission of critical data, and the emerging Wi-Max technology in a real, living environment with potentially thousands of
users.
Current Research
How iTiger Works
During a Clemson home football game:
• Athletic department staff creates the play-by-play stats
• Sent out the Internet to ESPN and to cstv.com who
provides the game over the web (clemsontigers.cstv.com)
• Athletic department operates all cameras
• If the game is televised video feeds go to ESPN
• All video goes to a video production crew (trailers by the
graveyard) who create the video presented on the ‘jumbotron’
Meanwhile, in the iTiger Control room:
• An operator combine the stats and the video feed into content
on the iTiger servers.
statistics
jumbotron
Video feed
Game Stats
Parser
itiger video
content
creation
process
database
Video
Capture
process
Video on Demand Server
Web Server
Wireless Infrastructure
The current research presents results from a link capacity
measurement study conducted over an IEEE 802.11b/g network
with highly stressed radio propagation conditions in a football
stadium. Existing capacity studies for IEEE 802.11 networks
have considered either stationary or statistical multipath fading
channel conditions. In an environment with a high density of
people and movement such as in a football stadium or a subway
station, the radio characteristics vary much more vibrantly, and
their impact on network capacity is not well understood. As a first
step to better understand such network characteristics, the study
examines the throughput of a mobile terminal over the stadium
network in the presence of varying radio conditions due to
movement of people and concurrent transmissions by other IEEE
802.11 devices. The study uses a novel approach to quantify
network utilization by the experiment terminal
as well as other contending terminals, using a
recorded packet trace. From the measured
utilization, throughput, and signal strengths, key
observations made include the fast variations in
signal strength due to crowd movement,
throughput’s dependency on signal strength
and chosen link rate, and contention with other
terminals. Based on the findings, the paper
discusses useful for performance assessment,
protocol enhancements, and improvements in
measurement methodology for such networks.
Research Questions
Future for iTiger
• Strategic Partnerships to enhance wireless
infrastructure
• Social Networking:
•What role can social networking have in the stadium
of the future?
• Web Services:
•How can the fan experience be enhanced when the
'cyberstadium‘ becomes a network of
'cyberstadiums'?
• Public Safety:
• How can the 'cyberstadium' enhance the
effectiveness of public safety and homeland security?
• Networking:
• How can the QoS capabilities of 802.11 and WiMAX
interoperate?
• How are resources managed when there is a public
safety event ?
• Roll out new prototype for 2008 Football season to include such
functionality as:
1. User capacity of 100
2. Provide play by play stats on the devices
3. Provide replay videos in conjunction with the stats
. Roll out a production by 2009 Football season quality system
that generates revenue.
. Add support for more portable devices.
Student Ideas :
 Football heliFAN-cam
 Student Football IPTV broadcast network
 tiger clemsonTUBE (fans upload video taken with the N800
PDA)
Will Pressly, Abhijit Sribhashyam
{wpressl, asribha}@clemson.edu
May 19, 2008