ECE Seminar Series: A New Look at Optimal Control of Wireless Networks

ECE title

ECE Seminar Series Fall 2017

Friday October 13th 2:30-3:30 PM, ITE 119

A New Look at Optimal Control of Wireless Networks

Eytan Modiano

Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract: We address the problem of throughput-optimal packet dissemination in wireless networks with an arbitrary mix of unicast, broadcast, multicast and anycast traffic. We start with a review of the seminal work of Tassiulas and Ephremides on optimal scheduling and routing of unicast traffic, i.e., the famous backpressure algorithm. The backpressure algorithm maximizes network throughput, but suffers from high implementation complexity, and poor delay performance due to packets looping inside the network. Moreover, backpressure routing is limited to unicast traffic, and cannot be used for broadcast or multicast traffic. We will describe a new online dynamic policy, called Universal Max-Weight (UMW), which solves the above network flow problems simultaneously and efficiently. To the best of our knowledge, UMW is the first throughput-optimal algorithm for solving the generalized network-flow problem. When specialized to the unicast setting, the UMW policy yields a throughput-optimal, loop-free, routing and link-scheduling policy. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed UMW policy incurs substantially smaller delays as compared to backpressure.


Short Bio
: Eytan Modiano received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1986 and his M.S. and PhD degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He was a Naval Research Laboratory Fellow between 1987 and 1992 and a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow during 1992-1993. Between 1993 and 1999 he was with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Since 1999 he has been on the faculty at MIT, where he is a Professor and Associate Department Head in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Associate Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). His research is on communication networks and protocols with emphasis on satellite, wireless, and optical networks. He is the co-recipient of the MobiHoc 2016 best paper award, the Wiopt 2013 best paper award, and the Sigmetrics 2006 Best paper award. He is the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He was the Technical Program co-chair for IEEE Wiopt 2006, IEEE Infocom 2007, ACM MobiHoc 2007, and DRCN 2015. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, and served on the IEEE Fellows committee.

Categories: Seminars

Published: September 25, 2017

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