This research addresses optimal scheduling, resource allocation, routing and flow control problems in networks. The resource allocation and scheduling models incorporate issues such as task priorities and deadlines, switching delays and network interconnections. The principal investigators will determine optimal scheduling strategies for interesting classes of problems and study the interplay among task priorities, switching delays, service distributions and queue lengths under such schedules. In routing the PIs will investigate the nature of optimal strategies under decentralized information, and determine how qualitative properties of optimal policies may be useful in the design of routing protocols. In flow control they will investigate optimization problems that arise in the performance design of the hop-by-hop layer of computer communication networks.
