ISR alumnus Mehdi Kalantari receives sensor networks grant

ISR alum Mehdi Kalantari has received a three-year, $300K grant from the National Science Foundation for Sensor Network Information Flow Dynamics.

Kalantari earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2005, advised by ISR-affiliated Professor Mark Shayman (ECE). Currently he is an Assistant Research Scientist in the ECE Department and and director of its M.S. in Telecommunication program.

Kalantari will 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. He will 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. These 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. Such findings will be important for next generation wireless networks, bringing together sensor networking, theoretical physics, partial differential equations, and numerical optimization.

Published October 6, 2009