Bala received his M.Tech (Opto Electronics and Laser Technology) from International School of Photonics, Cochin University, India and PhD degree in Electrical & Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2004 and 2008 respectively. His PhD dissertation, entitled QoS Aware Quorumcasting Over Optical Burst Switched Networks, was done under the supervision of Prof. Srinivas Talabattula.
Between May 2010-August 2012, he was working as postdoctoral researcher at Lightwave Research Laboratory, Columbia University, New York. Before that he was a, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Electrical Engineering , University of Leeds, UK and Visiting Scholar at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.