Thomas Hou has won a five-year, $449,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for research on Fundamental Performance Limits and Trade-offs in Wireless Embedded Sensor Networks. Considered NSF’s most prestigious grants for junior faculty members, CAREER awards are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education.
Hou’s research will focus on wireless sensor networks operating under a set of unique constraints and requirements. Hou’s main interests in this project are to study some fundamental performance limits and trade-offs that are inherent to wireless sensor networks, with the aim of laying a theoretical foundation for future protocol design and algorithm implementation.
Hou plans to pursue three thrust areas under the overarching theme of energy constraints and network lifetime: maximizing network lifetime through optimal power-controlled flow routing; understanding performance limits and the trade-offs between relay node placement and energy provisioning; and uncovering the inherent properties associated with the energy-constrained rate allocation problem.
“Our approach is multidisciplinary,” Hou said. “It spans the fields of wireless communications, networking algorithms, and optimizations. The outcome of this research will fill important gaps in the current understanding of wireless sensor networks, enabling this growing field to fully realize its potential.”
For more information on the NSF career program, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/career/start.htm. For more information on Hou’s wireless networking research efforts, please visit http://www.ece.vt.edu/~thou/.
