Virginia Tech awarded $7.5M grant to study speed of digital systems

The U.S. Department of Defense recently awarded Virginia Tech a $7.5 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant to study information latency, the measure of how quickly or slowly networked devices transmit information.

Virginia Tech will receive the funds over five years. There will be a three-year base period starting immediately and an optional two-year period.

The research team comprises four members of the College of Engineering. The basic science of information latency is undeveloped. The team’s goal will be to define information latency, develop a foundational framework for guaranteeing low latency and information freshness in military networked systems, and provide a suite of tools to optimize the transmission of information in massive-scale military networked systems.

The team will create prototypes and demonstrations and eventually equip the Department of Defense with latency-centric innovations.

The grant provides funding to research teams that submit proposals on topics designated as high importance to the department and military services.

“The challenges we face today are highly complex in nature and do not fall in line with a single discipline,” Mitch Nikolich, director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Research and Engineering for Research and Technology, said.

A total of $162 million was awarded to 24 research teams.