Research Descriptions
My early research works were on software engineering. There was no
systematic approach to software
testing in early 1970s. I had done works on software testing design, automated software testing, and
software instrumentation in mid-1970s. My research results have been used in automated software
testing systems designed for NASA and other institutions in USA and incorporated in modern CASE
(Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools. I had helped develop the software engineering program
of the Institute for Information Industry, a non-governmental organization established by late
Minister K. T. Lee (李國鼎政務委員) for promoting information industry in Taiwan, by serving as a technical
advisor for more than 10 years since its founding in 1979.
My research team designed the first computer resource sharing network in
Taiwan in early 1980s that
enabled precious computing resource sharing at a time when budget for universities was insufficient.
We were probably the first to recognize the efficiency problem of secure broadcasting in networks of
broadcast type, such as Ethernet, packet radio, and satellite. We proposed an efficient approach to
securely encrypting a message based on Chinese Remainder Theorem, so that only one copy of the
message needs to be sent for secure broadcasting. With recent proliferation of wireless networks
such as WiFi, WiMAX, LTE, and mobile networks, design of efficient secure broadcasting becomes even
more important.
With the trend of integration of telecommunications networks, Internet, and
media broadcasting
networks, provisioning of QoS (Quality-of-Service) becomes ever important in future networks. My
research team has done works on provisioning of QoS in mobile and wireless networks. We proposed a
signaling protocol for mobile hosts to reserve resources in the integrated services (IntServ)
Internet. The mobility impacts on packet delay, bandwidth utilization and packet loss rate are
minimized. We have extended the concept to All-IP (Internet Protocol) wireless networks by
integrating mobility management and QoS provisioning in a proposed hierarchical system architecture
design. All-IP wireless networks with QoS provisioning are considered as the next generation
wireless networks to provide seamless access for mobile applications. These works are expected to
contribute to the design of the future generation All-IP mobile Internet networks.
On parallel computing, my research team designed the first parallel
processing system in Taiwan in
late 1980s, with its parallel processor designed with state-of-the-art IC technology. We discovered
that an optimal mesh with broadcast capability is a rectangular instead of a square one for many
parallel algorithms and generalized the result to multidimensional mesh. This result has been widely
adopted by other researchers to reduce computational complexities of many well-known optimal mesh
algorithms with fewer processors. We also proposed a constant-time sorting k-dimensional parallel
architecture with the least number of processors nk/(k-1) that approaches the theoretical lower
bound n for larger k. Other notable works of my research team include image sequence coding,
high-speed packet switching networks, vertical handoff in heterogeneous wireless networks, and
wireless sensor networks.
For the next few years, my research team will focus on researches on
intelligent sensing and mobile
networking technologies and their applications. Emerging technologies and applications for Internet
of Things (IoT) have progressed tremendously in recent years. IoT is considered as one of the most
important components of future Internet. Things will be given computation and communication
capabilities to enable intelligent interactions between human and things, among themselves, and to
autonomously take safe and urgent actions according to environmental changes. A new age of
applications with efficiency, safety, and sustainability is coming with the aids of comprehensive
sensing from intelligent sensors, intelligent computation from cloud computing, and ubiquitous
communications from mobile networks. My research team aims to developing the enabling key
technologies for IoT, including fusion of intelligent sensing technologies, efficient and
energy-saving transmission mechanisms in wireless sensor networks, resource allocation and
scheduling schemes in next-generation mobile networks, and design of common service middleware and
platform. Intelligent home, healthcare, and crowdsourcing-based monitoring are chosen to demonstrate
the technologies that are developed in my research team. We intend to extensively collaborate with
researchers in universities and industries. We expect that our research results will contribute to
the national project “Intelligent Taiwan,” and increase competitiveness of related industries.