TALK    Scheduling and Medium Access in Wireless Networks

Date & Time:

Friday, November 18, 2011; 12:00 PM

Abstract:

We look at the problem of designing "efficient" resource allocation algorithms for wireless networks. The volume of data transferred over the wireless network has been ever-growing, but the resources (time, frequency) are not growing at the same rate. We therefore need to design good resource allocation schemes to guarantee a good quality of service to the users.

In the first part of the talk, we look at the wireless access network, such as Wi-Fi. We have three objectives: ensure high resource utilization, low user-perceived latency, while keeping the computational burden on the devices to a minimum. An interesting recent result by Shah et al says that these three objectives are incompatible with other, unless P=NP. We design a physical layer-aware medium access algorithm that simultaneously achieves the three objectives, and thereby show that the hardness result by Shah et al is an artifact of a simplistic view of the physical layer.

The second part of the talk focuses on designing scheduling algorithms for wireless downlink networks, such as a cellular network. Our objectives (again) are high resource utilization, low per-user delay, and a "simple" algorithm. We outline the drawbacks of the classic MaxWeight-type algorithms, and design iterative resource allocation schemes that perform well on all the three fronts.

Speaker:

Shreeshankar Bodas
MIT

Shreeshankar Bodas is a post-doc at LIDS, MIT. He obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UT Austin in 2010. His primary research interests include network algorithms and data center computations.