Mike Neely
EE Department, USC
Thursday, August 12 at 2:00pm PDT
11th floor large CR

Optimal Dynamic Control for Heterogeneous Networks

Modern data networks consist of a variety of heterogeneous components, and continue to grow as new applications are developed and new technologies are integrated into the existing communication infrastructure. In order to provide high speed connectivity for future personal computers, hardware devices, wireless units, and sensor systems, it is essential to develop fair and resource efficient networking techniques that take full advantage of all system capabilities.

In this talk, we develop optimal control strategies for general networks with both wireless and wireline components and time varying channels. To begin, we consider a simple wireless downlink and develop a scheduling algorithm that minimizes energy expenditure without requiring knowledge of traffic rates or channel statistics. We then consider a heterogeneous multi-hop network, and develop decoupled algorithms for flow control, routing, and resource allocation. The combined strategy supports all traffic whenever possible, and makes fair decisions about which data to serve when inputs exceed network capacity. Indeed, we show that total throughput can be pushed arbitrarily close to the optimal operating point achieved when all network controllers are coordinated and have perfect knowledge of future events. The cost of approaching this fair operating point is an end-to-end delay increase for data that is served by the network. Analysis is performed at the packet level and considers the full effects of queueing.

Bio:
Michael J. Neely received B.S. degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997. He then received a 3 year Department of Defense NDSEG Fellowship for graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received an M.S. degree in EECS in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2003. During the Summer of 2002, he worked in the Distributed Sensor Networks group at Draper Labs in Cambridge. His research interests are in the areas of satellite and wireless networks, ad-hoc wireless networks, and queueing theory. Michael is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa.