Travel Report from RTAS 2002

Elisabeth Uhlemann
Halmstad University, Sweden

January, 2003

 

The Conference


The Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, RTAS 2002, was held at the Double Tree Hotel in San José, CA, USA, September 24-27, 2002.

The RTAS focuses on applications and from this year on also embedded technology. It is in my opinion, a fairy theoretical conference with mainly theoretical analysis of applications. Companies are contributing by giving talks and participating in panel discussions, as opposed to e.g. the International Conference of Communication (ICC) where there is usually a full company exhibition outside the seminar rooms.

The conference has one single track with a varying number of talks within each session. Each talk within a session limited to 30 minutes including questions. There were a total of 27 technical papers. A ten-page paper in the conference proceedings accompanies each technical paper presented. The papers where accepted based on a 5000-words-paper subject to a peer-review process of three reviewers. It should be stated upon submission if the paper were in fact a research paper or an experience paper. The latter was intended to encourage practical application oriented papers and general participation by companies.

My impressions

With a single track it is easy to get an overview of the presentations at the conference. However, as in all real-time conferences I have previously attended (ECRTS 1999, ECRTS 2000 and RTCSA 2000) there are a wide variety of subjects that all have real-time constraints. Typically, a few of them are too far from my own research area in order for me to fully grasp their contents. Therefore I find that in general a double track is usually good when it comes to real-time conferences. One still has all the papers in the proceedings to see how the real-time problem is tackled in the different areas, but can attend the sessions on areas that borders on your own. However, as always with real-time conferences everybody knows everybody since it is a fairly small society and this results in a nice relaxed workshop feeling, facilitating new contacts.

The main purpose of attending the conference was to present the paper Concatenated hybrid ARQ - a flexible scheme for wireless real-time communication and, as always, to get new ideas and a general understanding of the ongoing research in the area.

There was only one session on communication, but it contained a paper I found most interesting: ''RAP: a real-time communication architecture for large-scale wireless networks'' by C. Lu, B.M. Blum, J. Stankovic, T. Abdelzaher, and T. He. For a nice description of the contents of this paper see Dan Henrikssons travel report from RTAS 2002. Apparently, the USA has a large ongoing government funded project on large-scale wireless sensor networks so we can expect to see more research in that area. The paper does not consider error control codes of any kind (which is the main contribution in my paper) with the motivation that the sensors should be kept as simple as possible. I think, however, that this would have to be included in a later version of the sensor networks.

Conclusions

 

The RTAS is a relevant conference of good quality. It is small enough to maintain a friendly workshop atmosphere, but still big enough to attract high quality researches. The way of mixing industry with academia by experience and research papers respectively was also very successful. My overall opinion was very positive.