Mung Chiang, an electrical engineering professor at Princeton, has been awarded the 2012 Kiyo Tomiyasu Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Chiang was honored “for demonstrating the practicality of a new theoretical foundation for the analysis and design of communication networks.” In announcing the award, the IEEE said that Chiang’s mathematical approach to networks “provides a fundamentally new way to analyze and design” network control. His work has been successfully applied to problems of wireless network power control, multimedia content distribution, and internet congestion and routing.

While traditional network design frequently focused on individual layers of a network, Chiang’s approach allows engineers to analyze the interactions between the network layers and provides a top down approach to network design.

“Chiang’s mathematical approach replaces traditional methods that were largely based on engineering intuition that resulted in suboptimal performance,” the IEEE said.

The Kiyo Tomiyasu Award is one of the IEEE institution-wide awards, and is selected each year for early to mid-career contributions that hold the promise of innovative applications. Chiang received the award at IEEE INFOCOM, a flagship conference in computer networking, on March 27 in Orlando, Florida. Chiang and coauthors, Carlee Joe-Wong and Soumya Sen, from Princeton, and Tian Lan, a Princeton alumnus now on faculty at George Washington University, also received the IEEE INFOCOM 2012 Best Paper Award for their work on fair resource allocation in cloud services.

In 2009, Chiang established the EDGE Laboratory to bridge the theory-practice gap in networking research. Among other projects, the lab has recently released a system for smart mobile pricing for consumers and wireless providers, and several apps for affordable video experience on tablets and smart phones.

An IEEE Fellow, Chiang is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008 and a few other awards such as NSF CAREER, ONR Young Investigator, and Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator. He joined the Princeton faculty after receiving his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford in 2003.