Research Themes for LAN
The focus for LAN falls into two areas: infrastructure based Wireless and infrastructureless Ad Hoc LANs. Ad Hoc Wireless LANs focuses on wireless Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). The research road map shown in Figure 1 illustrates on the various application areas and supporting protocols. Currently the work focuses on Monitoring and Planning, Location Tracking, Smart Access Point (AP) and Service Discovery.

Monitoring and Planning using 3D Visualization
The IEEE 802.11 standard is now a widely used standard, based on a, b, g, and n spectrum bands. Because these bands are all unlicensed bands, wireless providers are taking advantage of this open standard and they have the freedom to deploy them for public to be used widely. Wireless users can be affected by unforeseen circumstances if there were no proper planning of the wireless network. Therefore, the goal of this research is to determine and evaluate effective wireless planning and wireless network monitoring techniques for use by administrators to solve such issues.

Location Tracking
The area of indoor wireless positioning research has been an active area of research in recent years. The purpose of this project is to come up with an approach to locate mobile devices in indoor environment with high accuracy. Relying on signal strength is insufficient and inaccurate.

Smart Access Point (AP)
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is an increasingly used at home, in office environments, airports and some convenient public areas. Wi-Fi performance analysis and extended coverage optimization are essential because of the high usage. Unfortunately, the wireless communication problems such as bad coverage, mobility and interference would threaten the service quality. Intelligent wireless communication devices such as Cognitive Radios (CR) are able to adapt and reconfigure themselves to satisfy the end-users' needs. This research aims to new approaches to improve the performance of the cognitive engine to support real-time adjustments of the radio system.

Service Discovery
A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile routers (and associated hosts) connected by wireless links. The routers are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily; thus, the network's wireless topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. Such a network may operate in a standalone fashion, or may be connected to the Internet. Minimal configuration and quick deployment make ad hoc networks suitable for emergency situations like natural or human-induced disasters, military conflicts, emergency medical situations etc.

In the network, any software or hardware resources that users wish to utilize are called services. Service discovery is a network protocol which finds or detects any devices or services provided by network nodes automatically.

Although MANETs were initially mainly targeted at crisis applications (e.g., military, emergency and etc.) it has shown great potential for civilian applications as well. Due to the absence of any centralized coordinator, service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks is very important and significant. In a network where the topology is highly dynamic, frequent partitioning and merging of network components, a node should be able to locate services that other nodes provide. Hence, efficient service advertisement mechanisms are necessary. Topological changes force a change in the location of the service provider as well, hence fixed positioning of a server providing a particular service is ruled out. Instead, the service discovery protocol needs to identify the current location of the service provider. The integration of service discovery with the route acquisition mechanism is a suitable alternative that achieves better network efficiency compared to independent discovery and routing protocols. However, provision of certain kinds of services requires authentication, billing, and privacy, which in turn tend to cause the service discovery protocols to be implemented separately from the network layer protocols.