Prathima Agrawal, Samuel Ginn professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center, and Shiwen Mao, McWane associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, have received one of two best paper awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2013 International Conference on Communications Wireless Networking Symposium. Additional authors of their paper, “Algebraic connectivity of degree constrained spanning trees for FSO networks,” include Hui Zhou, doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering, and Alireza Babaei, former postdoctoral fellow in Auburn’s Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center. Free space optical (FSO) networks transmit data for telecommunications and computer networking. Directional FSO transceivers support high capacity communications, but performance can be easily disrupted by atmospheric obstructions such as rain and dust. Agrawal and Mao’s team studied FSO link reliability along with algebraic connectivity to ensure network dependability, resulting in topology control algorithms that outperform two existing systems.