Leandros Tassiulas received the ACM Mobihoc 2016 Best Paper Award, for the paper “Throughput-optimal Broadcast in Wireless Networks with Dynamic Topology” co-authored with collaborators Abhishek Sinha and Eytan Modiano from MIT. Mobihoc is the ACM International Symposium on Mobile AdHoc Networking and Computing, one of the premier forums for wireless networking.

Broadcasting is one of the primary information transport modes in a network, where a piece of information needs to be communicated to each and every participant node. It is a key constituent in a lot of today’s  applications that deal with the collection, processing and dissemination of massive amounts of data. In a mobile wireless network where the nodes frequently get disconnected, it becomes fairly challenging to ensure broadcast delivery.  Either multiple, possibly redundant transmissions are needed or atedious bookkeeping  of who heard what and in what precedence. In this paper the authors provide a broadcasting methodology and an algorithm that ensures message delivery in the challenging wireless mobile environment, while at the same time the supported rates of information delivery are maximized. Furthermore they characterize the achieved network capacity.