Mobile data traffic has experienced unprecedented growth recently and is predicted to grow further over the coming years. This exponential growth in the flow of mobile data and multimedia content has significant implications on wireless networks. For one, such wireless multimedia traffic requires certain quality of service guarantees. Another consequence is heterogeneity in network traffic. Wireless networks now carry heterogeneous stochastic traffic in diverse environments, and successful design of networks and effective quality of service provisioning for mobile multimedia communications critically depend on the appropriate choice of source traffic models. Motivated by these factors, this project addresses the important and timely topic of wireless communication with service guarantees. The outcomes of this research will significantly contribute to the design of next generation wireless networks supporting multimedia traffic with service guarantees, and are poised to have significant impact on the society due to extremely fast growth in mobile video traffic.
The methodology of this project is centered around combining tools from information theory and stochastic network calculus to establish a strong analytical framework by rigorously determining the fundamental limits of wireless communication under queuing constraints. In particular, this project investigates the maximum throughput in single- and multi-user wireless channels in the presence of random data arrivals and statistical queuing constraints. First, an idealistic setup with Gaussian codebooks and reliable communication with no bounds on the code lengths and no errors is addressed. Subsequently, wireless throughput is characterized in the more practical regimes of finite block-length coding and of finite-alphabet inputs with arbitrary distributions.
