Introduction

I am a PhD student in Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I got my master's degree from the University of Virginia in 2004. My research interests include wireless sensor networks, operating systems and embedded systems. My advisor is Tarek Abdelzaher.

Research Projects

Topics in wireless sensor networks including its operating system, communication protocols, low-power designs, and performance analysis.

Software Release

The LiteOS project that aims to develop a Unix-like environment for low-end sensor nodes. Version 0.3 was the latest release.

Awards

Vodafone Fellowship 2006-2007, 2007-2008

Representative Publications (The full list of 26 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%. The debugging tool presented in this paper will be provided as a plug-in in the LiteOS operating system in the near future. 

  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 with more than 200 downloads (as of version 0.3.3). 

  4. IEEE TPDS-07    uCast: Unified Connectionless Multicast for Energy Efficient Content Distribution in Sensor Networks, Q. Cao, T. He, T. Abdelzaher.

  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%.

  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 is referenced for 30 times. 

  7. ACM TOSN-06   A Scalable Logical Coordinates Framework for Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks. Q. Cao and T. Abdelzaher. The 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 is reference for 72 times.

  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. It has been referenced 28 times. A plugin software 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 has been referenced for 31 times.