Balakrishnan co-invented the Chord distributed hash table, the RON resilient overlay network (with David Andersen), and the rcc[2] tool for verifiable Internet routing (with Nick Feamster).
Results from the CarTel project include the Pothole Patrol[8] (with Jakob Eriksson and others), which used the opportunistic mobility of sensor-equipped vehicles to detect the surface conditions of roads, and the VTrack[9] and CTrack algorithms for accurate path and delay inference from noisy position streams.
His papers in the 1990s were among the first to develop a deep understanding of, and ways to improve, TCP's performance on wireless networks, for which he won the ACM doctoral dissertation award in 1998.
His work with Kyle Jamieson on SoftPHY systematically exploited demodulation confidence to improve bit rate adaptation, contention management, and parsimonious retransmissions for partial packet recovery, and his papers on sensor network protocols such as LEACH (with Wendi Heinzelman and Anantha Chandrakasan) and Spin were the first to consider overall system longevity as an important design goal, and have been cited many thousands of times by subsequent papers.
With Magdalena Balazinska and others, Balakrishnan developed methods for distributed load balancing and fault-tolerance in stream processing systems (Borealis project); this work received the ACM SIGMOD "Test of Time" award in 2017.
With Raluca Ada Popa and Nickolai Zeldovich, he helped develop CryptDB, a system for performing SQL queries over encrypted data.
2020: He received the Infosys Prize for Engineering and Computer Science, the most prestigious award that recognizes achievements in science and research in India, for his broad contributions to computer networking, his seminal work on mobile and wireless systems, and for commercial use of mobile telematics to improve driver behavior and make roads safer around the world.
In 2010, Balakrishnan founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics with Bill Powers and Sam Madden, and serves as the Chairman of its board.
He is also an advisor to several companies including YugabyteDB, Flowmill (acquired by Splunk), Valtix, Perch, Walrus Security, and StreamAlive.