Shuju Wu, a Ph.D. student, and Dr. Sujata Banerjee, an adjunct faculty member, in the Department of Information Science and Telecommunications have won the Best Paper Award for the IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC) 2004, awarded by the IEEE Communications Society. Their paper was titled "Improving the Performance of Overlay Multicast with Dynamic Adaptation".

Potential candidates for this award were identified from the submitted papers during the normal review process. A special independent Award Committee then evaluated the candidate papers together with their presentations and selected the best paper from the 110 accepted papers and 35 posters.

Their paper proposes an Adaptive Overlay Multicast (AOM) tree protocol that targets the performance of multicast applications, such as audio/video broadcasting, video replication and large software distribution, in the current best-effort Internet . AOM provides scalable and efficient distribution tree and actively adapts to Internet dynamics to keep the application performance at a high level.