Financial Assistance. Our PhD students receive good financial assistance including generous travel support for attending overseas conferences. There are a variety of scholarships available to both Australian and overseas students. Check out the Graduate Research School page for scholarship details. Unsurprisingly, these scholarships are competitive and awarded only to the top applicants. To be competitve, you'll need to demonstrate that you graduated from a top university in your country, achieved outstanding GPA, and possibly exposed yourself to some research leading to publications. And of course, your referees must speak highly about you. If you are an Australian Permanent Resident or Citizen, the most important criterion for APA (Australian Postgraduate Award) scholarships is to hold an Australian equivalent First Class Honours. If you are in doubt about your Honours Class, contact our school (CSE) office.

Research Proposal. For PhD admission at UNSW, you'll need to submit a brief (about 500 words or max of 2 pages) research proposal. Your proposal should define a broad problem you are proposing to solve with due citations to literature and some ideas for how you want to go about solving the problem. A sample research proposal can be found at the GRS web page (see under Faculty of Engineering, School of Computer Science and Engineering). I am currently working on the following research topics and projects (you are still welcome to contact me if you are interested in a topic area not listed here and you have a very good project proposal):

Research Topics

• Performance measurement and prediction of mobile broadband
• Streaming optimization for mobile clients
• Vehicular Internet access, vehicular safety communication, vehicular adhoc networks
• Mobile-to-mobile cooperation

Current Research Projects

Here is a list of our recent publications from this project:

• Jun Yao, Salil Kanhere, Mahbub Hassan, "Improving QoS in High-speed Mobility Using Bandwidth Maps," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Accepted (DOI 10.1109/TMC.2011.97). [ pdf ] [ bandwidth traces ]
• Jun Yao, Salil Kanhere, Imran Hossain, Mahbub Hassan, "Empirical Evaluation of HTTP Adaptive Streaming under Vehicular Mobility", IFIP Networking, 9-13 May 2011, Valencia, Spain. [ pdf ] [ bandwidth traces ]
• Jun Yao, Salil Kanhere, Mahbub Hassan, "Quality Improvement of Mobile Video Using Geo-intelligent Rate Adaptation", IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC 2010), Sydney, Australia, 18 April 2010. [ pdf ] [ bandwidth traces ]
• Jun Yao, Salil Kanhere, Mahbub Hassan, "Geo-intelligent Traffic Scheduling for Multi-homed On-Board Networks," 4th ACM International Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture (MOBIARCH'09 in conjunction with ACM MOBISYS'09), Krakow, Poland, 22 June 2009.[ pdf ] [ bandwidth traces ]
• Jun Yao, Salil Kanhere, Mahbub Hassan, "An Empirical Study of Bandwidth Predictability in Mobile Computing," 3rd ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and CHaracterization (WINTECH'08 in conjunction with ACM MOBICOM'08), San Francisco, 19 September 2008. [ pdf ] [ bandwidth traces ]
• Jun Yao, Salil Kanhere and Mahbub Hassan, "Mobile Broadband Performance Measured from High-Speed Regional Trains", IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2011-Fall), 5-8 Sep 2011, San Francisco, USA.

Here is a non-exhaustive survey of related work published in the recent literature:

• Paul, Subramanian, Buddhikot and Das, "Understanding Traffic Dynamics in Cellular Data Networks," INFOCOM 2011.
• Deshpande, Hou and Das, "Moving Bits From 3G to Metro-scale Wifi for Vehicular Network Access: an Integrated Transport Layer Solution," ICNP 2011.
• Chen, Berg, Ammar, Zegura, "Evaluation of Data Communication Opportunities from Oil Field Locations at Remote Areas," IMC 2011.
• An, Mittag, Schmidt-Eisenlohr and Torrent-Moreno, "Accurate Knowledge of Radio Channel and Network Conditions - When does it Matter?," IEEE International Conference on Wireless On-Deman Network Systems and Services, WONS 2011.
• Tso, Teng, Jia, and Xuan, "Mobility: A Double-Edged Sword for HSPA Networks," MOBIHOC 2010.
• Deshpande, Hou and Das, "Performance Comparison of 3G and Metro-Scale WiFi for Vehicular Network Access," International Measurement Conference, IMC 2010.
• Curcio, Vadakital and Hannuksela, "Geo-Predictive Real-Time Media Delivery in Mobile Environment," ACM MOVID 2010.
• Stiemerling and Kiesel, "Cooperative P2P Video Streaming for Mobile Peers," ICCCN 2010.