Sensors and Mobile Applications Research and Teaching (SMART) Lab

Location: F2-0-012 (Abu Dhabi Female Campus)

This lab (Sensors and Mobile Applications Research and Teaching) is used as a platform to expose our students to the various mobile and sensor networking technologies and the role they can play in the next generation networking vision. Students are offered the necessary background and hands-on experience in the cutting-edge areas of mobile networks and wireless sensors networking applications such as, Smart Home, Smart Office, Healthcare applications, and Environmental applications. This lab also acts as hub for various research activities and events, in relation to next generation technologies. This lab is equipped with the state-of-the-art equipment supporting a virtual cloud system and various sensory kits from well-known international vendors. The Virtual Environment in the lab consists of three stackable servers and one unified storage unit, all of which support virtualization. This environment will be mainly used to run simulations (using 3 simulation tools), store WSNs related data, and conduct experiments related to WSNs and mobile networking. The support for virtualization is motivated by the aim of allowing several students and faculty members to utilize the computational and storage resources of this environment, in parallel, and in a controlled and isolated fashion. The virtualization software proposed is the VMware VSphere 5 platform, which is considered an industry-leading virtualization platform. No specific vendor was chosen for the servers, while the EMC VNXe3100 unit was chosen as unified storage unit, due to our academic alliance with EMC. As part of this alliance, the EMC education program related material is integrated, in the form of hands-on labs, in a number of courses offered by our college.