Wireless Faculty Win Prestigious DARPA Grant

WNCG Faculty members Jeffrey Andrews, Robert Heath, and Sanjay Shakkottai were awarded a grant from DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) worth about $6,500,000 to develop a new non-equilibrium information theory that can describe the fundamental limits of mobile wireless ad hoc networks. All three are Assistant Professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and founding members of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group.

"It's rare that DARPA allocates such a large amount of funding for basic theoretical research, so our team feels very fortunate to have won this highly competitive grant", said Dr. Andrews, who will lead twelve faculty from eight universities in this five-year inter-disciplinary effort.

"We hope to develop an entirely new way of thinking about wireless networking by looking at the network as a whole, rather than individual communication links. Shannon's information theory in 1948 provided the bedrock for the information age, but has not proven successful at describing distributed networks with mobility and unpredictable delay. We hope to develop a general information theory that does, but it will be very challenging.”

Other team members include Peter Stone from the Department of Computer Science, as well as faculty from MIT, USC, Notre Dame, Minnesota , Penn State , UC Irvine, and Northwestern. The funds will primarily support graduate students, faculty salaries, staff, research workshops, and extensive collaboration amongst the team. Their proposal was entitled "Re-thinking mobile ad hoc networks: Non-equilibrium information theory."