This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The performance of wireless networks critically depends upon the careful design of networking protocols. Networking protocols are traditionally designed based only on intuition, and through a complex design process that is particular to the network at hand. The disadvantage of the traditional approach is that protocol design cycles are long, costly, and prone to human error. The lack of a general methodology also means that either the protocols are general-purpose and hence low-performance, or are specialized and hence inflexible and require complete re-design when the application specifications change. The major research contribution of this project is the establishment of a general methodology for the automation of networking protocols, taking the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols as a first prototype. The MAC protocol performance is critical in high-performance wireless networks. The following design process chain is created to generate a MAC protocol based on resource constraints and application-specific goals: (1) Optimization Program: Formulation of the network protocol problem that models the effects of control information exchanges, (2) Solvers: Optimal waveform generation, which specifies the optimal exchange of both control information and data, (3) Protocol Extraction: The extraction of the optimal protocol as a minimal description of the optimal waveforms. This technology opens the way to the design of networking protocols that will be based on automation design tools in the future. This project also integrates the development of prototype tools into graduate-level coursework.
