Wireless technology has emerged as a low-cost and infrastructure-free method to deploy communication networks and has inspired a wide range of applications such as wireless mesh networks for public safety, wireless sensor networks for unmanned surveillance, and vehicular networks for accident warnings. Many of these applications require effective delay control for desired performance, which, however, is one of the most difficult problems in wireless network design due to the inherent weaknesses of wireless communication such as limited bandwidth, channel fading, and interference.
In the past few years, a major breakthrough in wireless network research has been to harness the power of optimization theory and stochastic network theory for network design. These advances, however, shed little light on communication latency (or delay) because the focus is almost exclusively on the long-term throughput. This project takes a bold step to break away from today's throughput-first mentality, and embraces a delay-oriented approach where delay is a primary design objective, not a byproduct of throughput-oriented designs.
The expected results of this project include: (i) new network theories that quantify fundamental delay and throughput limits of wireless networks; (ii) transformative algorithms (functionalities spanning multiple network layers and their interactions) that are optimized for communications requiring delay guarantees; and (iii) distributed and low-complexity implementations. Theoretically, this project will lead to a union of stochastic analysis and optimization for quality of service control in wireless networks. Practically, this project will produce transformative algorithms for supporting delay constrained applications.
