Winner of the Inaugural GRIT Award

The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs announced the winners of the Graduate Research and Innovative Thinking (GRIT) Award. The award acknowledges and supports outstanding senior PhD students conducting original and innovative research, with the expectation that they will make a significant impact in their respective field of study. Recipients receive up to $5,000 to use for travel and related expenses to present their scholarly research at a top national or international conference.

Congratulations to Rengaraju Perumalraja (Systems and Computer Engineering) on receiving a GRIT award.

Perumalraja will present in Sardinia for the 9th IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference.

His topic: in multi-hop Fourth Generation (4G) wireless networks, the intermediate relay nodes may fail unexpectedly. If the relay node fails, the network will be not able to transmit packets to the receiving nodes and the network Quality of Service (QoS) will be significantly affected. The focus of his research is to protect the communications during relay node failure(s) using the network coding and wireless redundancy techniques. Hence, the network will still be able to deliver the messages correctly in case of relay failure(s) and maintain the network QoS requirements.