Maximum capacity

The fundamental capacity limits of wireless networks may finally be characterized thanks to a $400,000 US National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) award given to an electrical engineer at The

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“Trying to figure out the maximum amount of information you can push through a wireless network is a classical problem,” said Sriram Vishwanath, the recipient of the grant who is an assistant professor with the university’s Wireless Networking and Communications Group.

“Everyone’s trying to get at it from their own field. But the problem is there is a lack of appropriate tools within any one field to tackle the problem in its entirety.”

Vishwanath’s advantage is his understanding of three fields with useful approaches to studying network capacity. These fields are: information theory, optimization theory and coding theory.

“I want to combine these fields and come up with a whole new theory, a new methodology that’s never existed before,” Vishwanath said.