Jims Marchan, in collaboration with researchers at Plymouth University, has been investigating the problem of scarce shared bandwidth and limited battery life in the participating nodes of a typical Ad Hoc network.

In such networks, resource optimization and enhancing the overall network performance are the primary aims to maintain functionality. To this end, they have developed a novel cross-layer Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithm that aims to reduce the transmission power required when communicating with the next hop receiver based on a node’s location which is made available during node deployment.

Their simulation results indicate that in a random topology with a random source and destination, tie algorithm can provide a performance gain of between 30-70%, depending on the type of traffic in the network.

Public health monitoring

Timibloudi Enamamu and Abayomi Otebelaku have also been working with Jims, investigating how mobile wireless technologies, such as smartphones and smartwatches, can be used as sensors for public health - so called ‘m-health’ monitoring.

They have shown how a patient’s heart rate variability can be monitored by mobile devices and how signals can be decomposed into sub-bands of detail and approximation coefficients. They have carried out a comparison analysis after the classification of the extracted features to select the best sub-bands to use. By means of a use-case, with data from 30 subjects, they demonstrate that an equal error rate of 12.42% can be achieved.

iSec CyberNet

Jims also leads a university-funded research cluster called iSec CyberNet (the Intelligent & Secure CyberNet Research Cluster) focusing on cybersecurity and intelligent solutions for IoT based application systems with a particular interest in applications in health and wellbeing and supply chain management.