Milner, Davis Awarded $1 Million AFOSR Grant for Wireless Research

ECE Professor Christopher Davis and Civil Engineering Research Professor Stuart Milner have been awarded a three-year grant worth $1,048,279 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The grant will support their research proposal, titled "Quantifying and Assuring Information Transfer in Dynamic Heterogeneous Wireless Networks." Milner will serve as the Principal Investigator (PI) while Davis will serve as Co-PI.

Researchers at the University of Maryland, Cornell University and the University of Illinois will conduct a theoretical investigation of next generation, complex, heterogeneous, wireless networks aimed at quantifying, controlling and managing information transfer for theater, tactical and strategic support.

In their previous AFOSR-sponsored research, Davis and Milner focused on scalability, control, and capacity limits of heterogeneous, wireless networks that involve mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), links with disparate data rates from bits-per-second to above Gb/s, and directional wireless (free-space optical and RF) backbones, with an emphasis on the transfer of packets. In this effort, Davis and Milner will focus on network architectures and protocols that support information transfer. The researchers will address information-centric topology management and control vis-à-vis network topology management and control. The proposed research project is intended to provide new analytical and mathematical tools to understand the factors affecting communications in complex wireless networks and their effect on network performance.

Published March 31, 2009