Biography

Dr. Qing Cao is currently a postdoctoral research associate in Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He got his Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois in October, 2008, and his Master's degree from the University of Virginia. His advisor is Professor Tarek Abdelzaher. Dr. Cao is the author and co-author of over 25 papers in premier journals and conferences with over 500 citations. He is the main developer of the LiteOS operating system with more than 450 downloads. Dr. Cao has received a number of awards, including the Vodafone Fellowship and the best paper candidate in ACM Sensys 2008. He is a member of both ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.

Research Themes

As an experimental computer science researcher, my research passion lies in creating novel and practical system solutions for real world problems. My research interests span networked embedded systems such as wireless sensor networks, operating systems, wireless networking,  and embedded systems. These systems form the key underpinning technologies for the emerging area of Cyber-Physical Systems, which promise to transform our everyday lives with smart and ubiquitous networked devices that interact with the physical world. Usability, robustness, and performance are some of the key properties that I am concerned about in my research work.

Awards

Vodafone Fellowship 2006-2007, 2007-2008
Best Paper Award Candidate of ACM SenSys 2008 (one among four of 153 submissions)

Software Release

The LiteOS project that aims to develop a Unix-like environment for low-end sensor nodes. Version 1.0 was the latest release. This project is under active development.

Software Download Page

Representative Publications (The full list of papers is here)

  1. ACM Sensys-08  Declarative Tracepoints: A Programmable and Application Independent Debugging System for Wireless Sensor Networks, Q. Cao, T. Abdelzaher, J. Stankovic, K. Whitehouse, and L. Luo.  Acceptance rate: 17%. This paper is selected as one of four best paper award candidates.

  2.  IEEE RTSS-08   Virtual Battery: An Energy Reserve Abstraction for Embedded Sensor Networks, Q. Cao, D. Kassa, N. Pham, Y. Sarwar and T. Abdelzaher.   This paper presents the first battery reserve abstraction on resource-constrained sensor nodes, and has been integrated into the system level APIs of LiteOS.

  3. ACM/IEEE IPSN-08   The LiteOS Operating System: Towards Unix-like Abstractions for Wireless Sensor Networks, Q. Cao, T. Abdelzaher, J. Stankovic, and T. He. The system described in this paper has been released as open-source software to the research community. 

  4. IEEE TPDS-07    uCast: Unified Connectionless Multicast for Energy Efficient Content Distribution in Sensor Networks, Q. Cao, T. He, T. Abdelzaher. This paper introduces a generic, state-less multicast protocol that can be used for small-group multicast sessions in sensor networks. It has been implemented on MicaZ nodes. 

  5. IEEE INFOCOM-07   Cluster-Based Forwarding for Reliable End-to-End Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks, Q. Cao, T. Abdelzaher, T. He, and R. Kravets. Acceptance rate: 18%.  This paper applies the concept of cooperative communication to embedded sensor networks, and improves the performance of generic routing protocols. 

  6. IEEE INFOCOM-06   Efficiency Centric Communication Model for Wireless Sensor Networks. Q. Cao, T. He, L. Fang, T. F. Abdelzaher, J. A. Stankovic and S. Son. Acceptance rate: 18%.  This paper introduces a stream-oriented model for energy efficient packet delivery.

  7. ACM TOSN-06   A Scalable Logical Coordinates Framework for Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks. Q. Cao and T. Abdelzaher. This paper is the journal version of the RTSS 2004 paper, and its protocol has been developed as a plugin on the LiteOS operating system. 

  8. ACM/IEEE IPSN-05   Towards Optimal Sleep Scheduling in Sensor Networks for Rare Event Detection.   Q. Cao, T. F. Abdelzaher, T. He and J. A. Stankovic. Acceptance ratio: 20%. This paper presents the first locally optimal algorithm for reducing detection delays in sensor networks with partial sensing coverage following low-duty-cycle sleep scheduling. 

  9. ACM/IEEE DCOSS-05    Analysis of Target Detection Performance for Wireless Sensor Networks.   Q. Cao, T. Yan, J. A. Stankovic, and T. F. Abdelzaher. This paper presents the first closed-form results on the trade-offs between detection delay and energy consumption for random duty scheduling. A Java software frontend of the results presented in this paper is available in the LiteOS operating system. 

  10. IEEE RTSS-04  A Scalable Logical Coordinates Framework for Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks.  Q. Cao and T. Abdelzaher. Acceptance ratio: 22%. This paper presents logical coordinates, a powerful routing layer mechanism to achieve reliable and location-independent data delivery.