Professor Paul Mitchell  

Biography

Biography

Professor Paul Mitchell has been an academic at the University of York since 2005. He has
over 22 years research experience in wireless communications, and industrial experience
gained at BT and DERA (now QinetiQ). Primary research interests lie in underwater acoustic
communication networks, terrestrial wireless sensor networks, and communication protocols;
including the development of novel medium access control and routing strategies. The
application of machine learning to such distributed communication problems is of particular
interest. Other related interests include traffic modelling, queuing theory, satellite and mobile
communication systems. Professor Mitchell is an author of over 140 refereed journal and
conference papers and he has served on numerous international conference programme
committees including ICC and VTC. He was General Chair of the International Symposium
on Wireless Communications Systems in 2010. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of
the IET Wireless Sensor Systems journal, the International Journal of Distributed Sensor
Networks and MDPI Electronics, and has experience as Guest Editor and as a reviewer for a
number of IEEE, ACM and IET journals. He has secured more than >£2.3M + €4.7M
funding as principal and co-investigator.

Publications

Publications

Publications information is available via the York Research Database

Teaching

Taught Courses

Administrative Roles

School and University Committee Memberships

Research

Research Focus

I am a member of the Communications Technologies Research Group and lead our research
on underwater information systems, terrestrial wireless sensor networks and communication
protocols, focusing on the design and development of intelligent protocols for medium access
and routing. I work closely with colleagues who have expertise in other relevant areas.

Current research focuses on protocols for wire free networks, ranging from single hop
centralised topologies to multi-hop ad hoc topologies comprising mobile nodes. A key
challenge is to develop new approaches for intelligent self-organisation of such networks in
response to spatial and time varying environmental conditions. Underwater acoustic networks
are of particular interest and represent a huge challenge owing to the rapidly varying
propagation conditions and constraints of both long and variable propagation delay. For
terrestrial systems, we are interested in the challenges associated with large scale deployment
of wireless sensors for Internet of Things applications. We are applying artificial intelligence
techniques to the problems of interference management and medium access control. This
work is intended to significantly enhance the flexibility with which wireless devices can be
deployed and adapt in challenging environments. Machine learning is of particular interest,
where individual processing nodes learn how to share common spectrum from their prior
interactions with the wireless (acoustic or radio) environment. A good example is the
application of Q-learning to the medium access control problem in wireless sensor networks.
It has been shown that simple learning algorithms allow nodes to learn conflict free
transmission times on a shared frequency channel from an initial random access strategy. The
resulting capacity of the networks can approach the theoretical maximum without the need
for centralised coordination and with much lower overheads and complexity than distributed
scheduling algorithms.
We are developing low-complexity protocols and algorithms for hardware implementation,
backed up by simulation and mathematical models where appropriate. Environmental
monitoring applications are of particular interest for practical demonstration of our research
ideas, where we are studying the use of wireless sensor networks for underwater applications,
acoustic species identification, tree health and pollution monitoring.

Example Research Projects

• Communications from aerial platform networks delivering broadband communications for all (Contributor to the work programme, Funded under the EU Framework 6 Programme)

• Energy-efficient medium access control for wireless sensor networks realised through aerial platforms (Principal Investigator, Funded by EPSRC)

• Towards a wireless aircraft (Contributor to the work programme, Funded by the EPSRC-BAE Systems Flaviir Programme)

• Cognitive routing for tactical ad hoc communications (Co-Investigator, Funded by the Ministry of Defence Centre for Defence Enterprise)

• Sounds Different - Self optimising acoustic sensing (Co-Investigator, EPSRC Institutional Award)

• Cutting-edge approaches for pollution assessment in cities (Co-Investigator, Funded under the EU Framework 7 Programme)

• Application-aware user-centric programmable architectures for 5G multi-tenant networks (Co-Investigator, Funded under the EU Horizon 2020 Programme)

• Advanced clustered multi-hop wireless sensor networks (Principal-Investigator, Funded by industry)

• Nigeria-HAP: Scoping study for low-cost, high reliability wireless broadband delivery to Nigerian rural communities using high altitude platform and terrestrial infrastructures powered by renewal energy (Co-Investigator, Funded internally by EPSRC)

• CHAPA – Centre for High Altitude Platform Applications (Co-Investigator, Funded internally by EPSRC

• USMART – smart dust for large scale underwater wireless sensing (Principal-Investigator, Funded by EPSRC)

• Resilient aerial platform communications (Co-Investigator, Funded internally by EPSRC)

• Heterogeneous wireless mesh communications for rural or remote communities using high altitude platform, low altitude platform and terrestrial infrastructure (Co-Investigator, Funded by industry)

• Full-Duplex for underwater acoustic communications (Principal-Investigator, Funded by EPSRC)

• Enhancing collaboration in sustainable wireless communication networks (Co-Investigator, Funded internally by EPSRC)

• York-Haifa Underwater Acoustic Communications Experiments (Co-Investigator, Funded by the Royal Society)

• Distributed beamforming antenna testbed at millimetre wave band (Co-Investigator, Funded internally by EPSRC)
  
  
• Cyber security for underwater communication (Principal Investigator, Funded by the British Council)

• High bandwidth covert underwater acoustic communications (Principal Investigator, Funded by EPSRC/Thales UK)

• Phorcys – Underwater Channel Modelling (Principal Investigator, Funded by Thales UK)

• Phorcys – Underwater Networking (Principal Investigator, Funded by Thales UK)

• Innovating the future of bio-inspired autonomous robot fish for offshore renewable
  energy inspection (Co-Investigator, Funded by the White Rose Collaboration Fund)

• COUSIN - Cooperative underwater surveillance networks (Principal Investigator, Funded
  by EPSRC)

Research Students

Current PhD Students:

Aliyu Ahmed, Joseph Harrison, Rahul Matthew, Gary Benson, Jie Zhang, Florian Mahieu

Former PhD Students:

Ibrahim Bala Alhassa, Steve Arum, Mohammed Baz, Lawal Mohammed Bello, Arnold Chau,
Jingxin Chen, Yi Chu, Abimbola Fisusi, Xinwei Fang, Wael Gorma, Bo Han, Yunbo Han,
James Harbin, Thomas Hesketh, Tao Jiang, Ruofan Jin, Mahmudul Haque Kafi, Selahattin
Kosunalp, Kunyoung Lee, Li Liao, Haibin Li, Hengguang Li, , Zhehan Li, Pairoj
Likitthanasate, Yiming Liu, Yuming Lu, Tautvydas Mickus, Sunghyun Park, Jian Qiu, Tong
Wang, Yan Yan, Muhammad Zakaria

Former MSc by Research Students:

Linjun Dong, Elizar Elizar, Yuci Gou, Haopeng Li, Zhongwei Sun, Yuhai Wang, Zhe Yang,

Facilities

To support the underwater networking activities, we have a number of acoustic modems and processing boards for practical experimentation. For the terrestrial wireless sensor network research activities, the group has a number of IRIS , MICA2 and MICA2DOT hardware development kits. Riverbed Modeler and MATLAB are available for protocol simulation and to support mathematical analysis.  

External

External Examining

Journal Editorial Duties

• September 2008 to September 2010 - Guest Editor for IET Communications, Special Issue on Satellite Services, Applications and Networking
• May 2010 to present - Associate Editor of IET Wireless Sensor Systems
• February 2011 to present - Member of the Editorial Advisory Board for an IGI Global book on Using Cross-Layer Techniques for Communication Systems
• September 2013 to November 2014 – Guest Editor for IEEE Sensors, Special Issue on Wireless Smart Sensors for Space and Extreme Environments
• November 2014 to present – Associate Editor of the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
• April 2015 – Guest Editor for IET Wireless Sensor Systems, Special Issue on Ubiquitous IoT for Wireless Sensor Systems
• April 2015 – Guest Editor for IEEE Sensors, Special Issue on Internet-of-Things Wireless Sensor Systems
• November 2016 – Lead Guest Editor for the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, Special Issue on The Medium Access Control Challenges in Energy-Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Networks
• March 2017 to present – Founder member of the Advisory Board for the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
• November 2018 to November 2019 – Guest editor for Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks –
  Special Issue on Underwater Networking
• February 2020 to present – Member of the Editorial Board for MDPI Electronics – Networks
  Section
• November 2021 to present – Guest editor for MDPI Electronics - Special Issue on Underwater
  Optical and Acoustic Communications: Research and Challenges

Some Invited Lectures and Awards

• 2002 - Invited to the University of Bradford to give a research seminar on ‘Medium access control for geostationary satellite systems’.
• 2005 - Invited speaker at the Institution of Electrical Engineers to give a lecture on ‘Improved quality of service in future satellite systems through effective medium access control’.
• 2009 - IET Best paper award for "Improvement in pre-partitioning on reinforcement learning based spectrum sharing", IET International Communication Conference on Wireless Mobile & Computing (CCWMC).
• 2011 - Invited speaker at the European Microwave Conference to give a workshop presentation on ‘Medium access control for wireless sensor networks’.
• 2012 - Best paper award for "ROLBPS - Runtime optimisation in WSNs for load balancing using pheromone signalling", IEEE International Conference on Networked Embedded Systems for Every Application (NESEA)
• 2015 – Invited speaker at the Knowledge Transfer Network workshops on Wireless Sensor Networks in Urban Living and Health
• 2016 - Invited speaker at the University of Loughborough to give a research seminar on ‘Intelligent medium access control for wireless communication systems’.
• 2017 - Invited to IMT Atlantique to give a talk on wireless communications and underwater networking research.
• 2017 - Invited to Xiamen University to give talks on intelligent medium access control and wireless communications and underwater networking research.
• 2018 - Best paper award for "Performance of the ALOHA-Q MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks," IEEE International Conference on Computing, Electronics & Communications Engineering (iCCECE)
• 2018 - Best paper award for “CFDAMA-IS: MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks”, International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems (BROADNETS)
• 2019 – Invited to give a plenary talk at the ACM International Conference on Underwater
  Networks & Systems (WUWNet)
• 2019 – Invited to give a plenary talk at the TE Connectivity Scientific Advisory Board
  meeting on the development of wireless networking techniques for low and zero power
  sensor deployments

Conference Leadership and Organisation

• 2004 - Session Chair at the Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications Conference
• 2010 - General Chair of the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2011 - General Co-Chair of the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2011 - Special Sessions Chair of the International ICST Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONETICS)
• 2011 - Session Chair at the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2012 - Divisional Officer on the Committee Steering Panel of the IET Wireless Sensor Systems Conference (WSS)
• 2012 - Session Chair at the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2013 - Workshop Organiser at the IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments (WiSEE)
• 2013 - Organised a Special Session at the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2013 - Special Session Technical Programme Committee Track Chair at the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2013 – Session Chair at the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2013 – Member of the Programme Committee of the International Workshop on Engineering Energy Efficient WSNs (EEEWSN) at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA) 
• 2013 – Member of the Organising Committee of the IET Secure Satellite Communications Conference
• 2014 – Technical Programme Committee Track Chair (Satellite Networks, Positioning Technologies, Localization and Navigation) at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (Spring)
• 2014 - Member of the Programme Committee of the International Workshop on Engineering Energy Efficient WSNs (EEEWSN) at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA) 
• 2014 – Workshop Chair for the International Conference on Wireless and Satellite Systems
• 2015 - Steering Manager and member of the Programme Committee of the International Workshop on Ubiquitous Wireless Sensor Systems (UWSS) at the IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC)
• 2015 – Co-chair of the Organising Committee for the Wireless Sensor Systems Workshop (WSSW) at the IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments (WiSEE)
• 2016 - Member of the Programme Committee of the International Workshop on Engineering Energy Efficient WSNs (EEEWSN) at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA)
• 2017 - Structured Session Co-Chair on Underwater Communications and Networking at the Underwater Acoustics Conference & Exhibition (UACE)
• 2017 - Publication Chair at the International Conference of Wireless and Satellite Systems (WiSATS)
• 2017 - Track Co-Chair for the Radio Access and Softwarisation track at the EuCNC Conference
• 2018 - Co-chair of a special session on Intelligent Transport Systems at the International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP)
• 2018 - Member of the Organising Committee of the International Conference and Business Expo on Wireless, Telecommunication & IoT
• 2018 - Special Session Technical Programme Committee Track Chair and Special Session Organiser at the International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• 2019 - Structured Session Co-Chair on Underwater Communications and Networking at
  the Underwater Acoustics Conference & Exhibition (UACE)
• 2019 – Became a member of the UCOMMS technical committee
• 2020 - Co-chair of a special session on Intelligent Transport Systems at the IEEE/IET
  International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Signal
  Processing (CSNDSP)
• 2021 - Structured Session Co-Chair on Underwater Communications and Networking at
  the Underwater Acoustics Conference & Exhibition (UACE)

Conference Technical Programme Committees

I have served on the Technical Programme Committees of the following conferences:

• 6G Wireless Summit
• European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC) – Radio Access and Softwarisation (RAS) track
• IEEE First 5G World Forum (WF-5G)
• IEEE Future Networks World Forum
• IEEE GCC Conference and Exhibition
• IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
• IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
• IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing – International Symposium on 5G Satellite Networks: Signal Processing Applications and Challenges IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
• IEEE International Conference on Communication, Networks and Satellite (COMNETSAT)
• IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Intelligence System (IoTaIS) International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Network (WiMNET 2022)
• IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments
• IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC)
• IEEE Middle East and North Africa Communications Conference (MENACOMM)
• IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC)
• International Conference on Advanced Technologies Enhancing Education (ICAT2E)
• International Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems
• International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS)
• International Conference on Computer, Communication, and Control Technology (I4CT)
• International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics (Icon EEI)
• International Conference on ICT for Rural Development (ICT-Rudev)
• International Conference on Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, and Communications Technology (IAICT)
• International Conference on Innovation and Intelligence for Informatics, Computing, and Technologies (3ICT)
• International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT)
• International Conference on Recent Advances in Signal Processing, Telecommunications & Computing (SIGTELCOM)
• International Conference on Signals and Systems (ICSigSys)
• International ICST Wireless Internet Conference
• International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP)
• International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS)
• International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing
• International Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC)
• International Workshop on Cognitive Information Processing
• International Conference of Wireless Networks for the World Congress on Engineering
• Mosharaka International Conference on Communications, Signals and Coding
• Mosharaka International Conference on Communications, Networking and Information Technology
• Symposium on Future Telecommunication Technologies (SOFTT)
• Wireless Days

Reviewing Activities

I have served as a reviewer for the following institutions, publishers, journals:

Funders

• EPSRC responsive mode research funding applications.
• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
• Leverhulme Trust
• Science Foundation Ireland (Frontiers for Partnerships Awards Programme)
• Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC), UK
• Communications Engineering Review Panel for the Natural Sciences and Engineering
• Research Council at the Academy of Finland

Societies

• British Computer Society Distinguished Dissertations Competition
• IEEE Senior Member applications

Book publishers

• CRC Press / Taylor & Francis Group
• Elsevier
• IGI Global
• ISTE Press
• Springer
• Wiley

Journals

• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
• IEEE Access
• IEEE Communications Letters
• IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering
• IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
• IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Communications
• IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
• IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
  IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
• IEEE Wireless Communication Letters
  IET Communications and formerly IEE Proceedings
• IET Computers & Digital Techniques
• IET Electronics Letters
• IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation
• IET Networks
• IET Wireless Sensor Systems
• Elsevier Computer Communications Journal
• Elsevier Computer Networks Journal
• Elsevier Performance Evaluation Journal
• Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing
• Elsevier Sensors and Actuators A: Physical
• Elsevier Vehicular Communications Journal
• ACM Journal of Wireless Networks
• AIP Review of Scientific Instruments
• Annales des Telecommunications
• Automatika: Journal for Control, Measurement, Electronics, Computing and Communications
• EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
• European Transactions on Telecommunications
• Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
• International Journal for Light and Electron Optics (IJLEO)
• International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing (IJAHUC)
• International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
• International Journal of Technology Management (IJTM)
• Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (JCMSE)
• MDPI Computers
• MDPI Entropy
• MDPI Sensors
• Springer Computing
• Springer Neural Computing and Applications
• Taylor & Francis The Imaging Science Journal
  Telecommunication, Computing, Electronics and Control (TELKOMNIKA)
  Wiley International Journal of Communication Systems
• Wiley Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

Conferences (outside TPC memberships):

• IEEE ICC
• IEEE Globecom
• IEEE Personal, Indoor and Mobile Communications Conference (PIMRC)
• IEEE Softcom
• IEEE MASCOT
• IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference
• IEEE WRECOM
• IST Mobile Communications Summit
• International Workshop on Cognitive Networks and Communications
• International Workshop on Satellite and Space Communications
• International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks
• International Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems
• International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems
• International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing
• Mosharaka Multi-Conference on Communications, Networking and Information
  Technology
• World Congress of Engineering - International Conference of Wireless Networks