With the advent of smart devices and the Internet of things, wireless technology has spawned a plethora of services that span business, science and engineering, entertainment, safety and security, health monitoring, and cover a large portion of our social interactions. Due to the prevalence of these new services, today's wireless networks are witnessing not only an unprecedented growth in the volume of traffic, but also a significant change in the types of traffic (e.g., a much higher percentage of voice/video traffic with more stringent delay requirements). These new trends require next-generation wireless networks to provide not only high data rates (tens of gigabits per second), but also ultra-low latencies (sub-millisecond). Moreover, as wireless networks grow and support an increasingly large number of users, network control algorithms must also incur low complexity in order to be implemented in practice. However, the question of how to simultaneously achieve high throughput, low delay and low complexity remains largely open. Addressing this major research challenge is a main goal of this project. Not only is this research expected to substantially advance our understanding of designing efficient control algorithms for wireless networks with jointly optimized performance, but it would also expand/create the much-needed theoretical foundations for developing simple and practical protocols to optimize the key performance metrics needed in the design of next-generation wireless networks. This research will also be closely integrated with a comprehensive educational plan, which is focused on providing research experiences to undergraduate and K-12 students, recruiting and training underrepresented students, and engaging in curriculum development activities.
The goal of this project is to create new theoretical foundations for designing provably efficient network control algorithms that perform well in all three dimensions of throughput, delay, and complexity. Specifically, this research will be carried out around three main thrusts: (i) it focuses on intra-cell control for a multi-channel cellular network, and aims to build a theoretical framework for designing low-complexity scheduling algorithms with provably guaranteed optimal throughput and optimal (or near-optimal) large-deviations delay rate-function; (ii) it considers a more challenging setting of network-wide control for larger systems (e.g., a dense multi-cell system or an ad hoc wireless network), and aims to develop a new node-based approach for designing efficient scheduling algorithms with provable throughput and evacuation time performance; and (iii) it considers distributed network-side control and aims to design low-complexity algorithms that achieve high throughput and low delay.
