The principal investigator (PI) will study dynamic and stochastic scheduling (allocation), synchronization (coordination), and concurrency aspects of communication systems, especially those related to networking, multi-accessing, and service integration. He will acquire a basic theoretical understanding of how these issues emerging at the level of elementary operations, affect the macroscopic performance of communication networks. Based on that he will address the design (synthesis) of efficient operational schemes (protocols, policies) for the optimization of networks with respect to criteria concerning throughput, message delays, blocking probabilities, fairness, load balancing, and reliability. In addition, the PI will create a unified framework emphasizing rigorous mathematics for studying basic prototypical models, extracted from various practical situations involving scheduling and synchronization in communication networks. New powerful queueing models will be developed to capture essential features of concurrency and synchronization, extending classical queueing theory and allowing the systematic analysis of the dynamics and performance of protocols. Real-time scheduling and resource allocation schemes will be studied in a natural stochastic framework. In cases where the relevant optimal scheduling algorithms are of high complexity, the focus will be on exploring simple (low complexity) scheduling schemes of operations to improve the performance. Other aspects of dynamic scheduling will also be examined, if necessary by simulation.
