The Computer Science Colloquium

Thomas F. La Porta
(Penn State)

"Mobility in Sensor Networks"

Deployment of large scale sensor networks is getting closer to reality. It is now clear that it is highly desirable to have mobile sensors in support of many applications. Mobility of sensor nodes can assist in solving many problems in sensor networks (coverage, recovery from failure), but introduces or complicates many others (data dissemination, security). In this talk I will provide a background on mobile sensor networks and give an overview of our research, including using mobility for improving coverage and fault recovery. I will also discuss our work on providing efficient support for data dissemination in a mobile sensor environment.


Bio:
Thomas F. La Porta received his B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, NY. He joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Penn State in 2002 as a Full Professor. He is the Director of the Networking and Security Research Center at Penn State. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. La Porta was with Bell Laboratories since 1986. He was the Director of the Mobile Networking Research Department in Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies where he led various projects in wireless and mobile networking. He is an IEEE Fellow and Bell Labs Fellow. Dr. La Porta was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Personal Communications Magazine. He is currently the Director of Magazines for the IEEE Communications Society. He has published over 50 technical papers and holds 28 patents. He was an adjunct member of faculty at Columbia University for 7 years where he taught courses on mobile networking and protocol design.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.