USC's Viterbi School of Engineering will partner in an interdisciplinary research center focused on the science of communication networks with approximately $35.5 million in funding over 10 years from the Army Research Laboratory.

Ramesh Govindan

The Communication Networks Research Center, part of the new Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance, will perform foundational research on the science of communications networks. Its goal is to understand the limits and evolution of networks like the Internet or tactical wireless networks.

At USC, the center is headed by Ramesh Govindan of the Computer Science Department. Govindan and Viterbi colleagues including Gerhard Kramer, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Michael Neely, and Konstantinos Psounis will focus on research that can improve the quality and accuracy of information exchange in tactical networks ten-fold.

Headquartered at Penn State University, the center includes participants from the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the City University of New York. Several institutions also will be collaborating with the center including the University of California at Riverside, North Carolina State University, Stanford University and BBN Technologies.