WPI professor receives NSF CAREER Award for Research at frontiers of wireless networking

5-year, $450,000 award will fund a comprehensive study of opportunistic routing, a relatively new concept in multihop wireless networking that takes better advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications

Wenjing Lou, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Click here for more information.

WORCESTER, Mass. – February 29, 2008 – Wenjing Lou, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has received a five-year, $450,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The award is the NSF’s most prestigious for young faculty members.

Lou is the 20th member of the WPI faculty to receive a CAREER Award since 1995. In all, 18 current members of the faculty have won CAREER Awards.

Lou’s research focuses on wireless networks and their security. The CAREER Award will enable her to conduct a comprehensive study of a relatively new concept in wireless networking, one that takes better advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications.

The aim of the research is to find ways to increase the efficiency, throughput, and reliability of wireless networks and to develop computer models and protocols that will enable designers to create more effective wireless technology.

The multihop networks Lou studies differ from the ones most wireless users encounter. In a home, office, or cellular network, a user with a laptop, cell phone, or other wireless device connects to a base station or access point in a single hop. The signal then travels over wires. Multihop networks (including sensor networks used in environmental monitoring, building security, and battlefield surveillance) are made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual wireless nodes. Signals from individual devices must hop wirelessly from node to node to reach their ultimate destination.

In a typical multihop network, a node that needs to send a packet of information selects from its neighboring nodes the one that appears to have the best chance to pass the signal along successfully and directs the packet to that node alone. However, intermittent channel fluctuations may prevent the packet from getting through. In opportunistic routing, the packet is sent to multiple neighbors and each one assesses its ability to forward the packet to its neighbors based on the instantaneous state of the network. The node with the highest probability of success passes the data along.