The Internet is now the world's dominant information infrastructure. Numerous requests from Internet users and their applications compete for shared resources in multiple ways. It is therefore critical to efficiently allocate limited network resources in order to provide high quality services. Improving the performance of the Internet in this manner has the potential to have extremely broad impact.
Resource management becomes even more challenging when mobile devices connecting to the Internet are considered. Designing efficient algorithms is difficult mainly due to the following factors: (1) diverse and unpredictable resource requests; (2) physical limitations on Internet links, on buffer space in network switches, on capacity of wireless channels, and on battery power in mobile devices.
This project aims to provide solutions for several fundamental algorithmic problems in networked systems and applications. Robust and insightful online algorithms will be developed for network switches forwarding prioritized packets and energy management in mobile devices. The objective is to understand the mathematical structure of these problems, to design elegant and easy-to implement online algorithms, to provide rigorous analysis on their performance bounds, and to integrate these algorithms into the real systems to achieve better performance.
