NSF Grant for Next-Gen Wireless Networks

Mehdi Kalantari, ECE assistant research scientist and director of the M.S. Program in Telecommunication, has received a new grant from the National Science Foundation. The three-year grant, worth approximately $300,000, is titled "Sensor Network Information Flow Dynamics."

The objective of the research is to develop numerical techniques for solving partial differential equations (PDE) that govern information flow in dense wireless networks. Despite the analogy of information flow in these networks to physical phenomena such as thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, many physical and protocol imposed constraints make information flow PDEs unique and different from the observed PDEs in physical phenomena. The approach is to develop a systematic method where a unified framework is capable of optimizing a broad class of objective functions on the information flow in a network of a massive number of nodes. Finally, numerical techniques will be developed to solve the PDEs in a network setting and in a distributed manner.

The research will involve the development of mathematical tools that address a broad range of design objectives in large scale wireless sensor networks under a unified framework, as well as the development of design tools for networking problems such as transport capacity, routing, and load balancing.

The broader impact of this research is aimed at the development of next generation wireless networks, bringing together sensor networking, theoretical physics, partial differential equations, and numerical optimization.

Published October 6, 2009