Passive optical networks (PONs) are a low cost, high-speed technology that offers a promising solution to broadband subscriber access networks. A major feature of PONs is the utility of a shared upstream channel among multiple users, making bandwidth management a critical issue.

Ms. Luo's first invention, "Limited Sharing with Traffic Prediction for Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation over Broadband Passive Optical Networks," provides a technique that would allocate the upstream channel bandwidth efficiently and dynamically among multiple users, by predicting the traffic arriving at the waiting time.

Another problem in PONs is service differentiation due to the differences in subscriber's service level agreements. Ms. Luo's second invention, "Service Differentiation Enhancement of Limited Sharing with Traffic Prediction for Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation over Broadband Passive Optical Networks," integrates queuing, scheduling, and class-based bandwidth allocation to serve diverse end-users. If these methodologies are accepted as standard, there is potential for significantly greater widespread use of broadband access networks, since the performance and service would be greatly improved.

Ms. Luo authored three academic papers that have been accepted or published by high level international journals and conferences, delivered technical presentations to industry organizations, and received numerous honors and awards including a Certificate of Distinction for participation in the Provost's Student Research Day at NJIT, First Place for the IEEE Student Present-ation Contest for North Jersey, and being invited to speak at the Notre Dame University Minority Engineering Program IBM Lecture Series.