While there is a definite need for engineers well versed in areas such as algorithms, economics, and management, there is little opportunity to add these areas to an already crowded engineering curriculum. Hence it is incumbent upon engineering educators to diversify the existing curriculum to incorporate these topics wherever possible. It is of interest, then, that certain kinds of engineering problems give rise to these subjects naturally. For example, in networking and communications it is not uncommon to encounter systems that would benefit from decentralized operation, and possibly even fully distributed or market-type" operations, in which the distributed actors are allowed to perform independently and free of centrally imposed constraints. The engineer must then must ensure that the "market" leads to the desired (e.g., fair or, more commonly, efficient) operational solution. This project involves research in wireless communication networks and the integration of algorithm design, economic, and management issues arising therein into the engineering curriculum.
Power control is an important element in modern wireless communication networks, and is essential in networks based on IS-95 or code division multiple access. This project's research is directed toward power control systems which, unlike conventional power control systems, do not follow a received-power balancing or signal-to-interference ratio balancing algorithm. Instead, the ne3w systems target minimum energy consumption for a given quality of service. They also differ from their predecessors because they optimize dynamically and cooperatively - a sufficiently high interference levels, a transmitter begins to decrease its power. By contrast, essentially all existing power control systems call for nodes to increase power when faced with increased interference, in some cases to the point of saturation at all mutually interfering nodes. Power control systems based on the new approach have the potential to outperform conventional systems significantly, in terms of offering better stability and equivalent throughputs at considerably lower average powers. While the benefits are system-wide, the actions that lead to them are purely selfish from the standpoint of the transmitter, and require no explicit coordination with other nodes. This research aims to exploit these principles for the development of improved power control algorithms and, more generally, for efficient distributed resource allocation algorithms applicable to a variety of engineering problems.
