This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111- 5).
The fundamental differences between multi-hop networks and point-to-point settings indicate that leveraging MIMO gains in multi-hop networks requires a paradigm shift from high SNR regimes to interference-limited regimes. This project undertakes a broad research agenda centered around developing fundamental theory towards achieving optimal throughput and delay performance in wireless networks. The first key step is to take a bottom-up approach for solid model abstraction of MIMO links while taking into account interference, and to extract a set of feasible rate/reliability requirements, corresponding to meaningful MIMO stream configurations. Under a common thread of MIMO-pipe scheduling, this project focuses on tackling the following challenges: 1) Developing rate/reliability models for ``MIMO-pipes'' in multi-hop networks; 2) MIMO-pipe scheduling for throughput maximization and delay minimization; and 3) Real-time scheduling of MIMO-pipes with delay constraints (for time-critical traffic).
This project contributes to the formulation of new fundamental theories for multi-hop MIMO networks, which have direct impacts on many wireless applications. Particularly, real-time scheduling sheds much light on leveraging MIMO gains in VANET to deliver timely information reliably to save lives and improve quality of life. Underrepresented undergraduate students as well as graduate students participate in this project.
