Meeting the traffic demands, performance, energy, and cost requirements envisaged for next generation wireless infrastructure drives WNCG researchers and industry to examine possible new network architectures and algorithms.
Cloud RAN
Leveraging cloud-based computing infrastructure to implement the Radio Access Network (RAN) functionality and possibly virtualize base station processing would enable new forms of scheduling and coordinated multipoint transmissions, while leveraging the many advantages of cloud infrastructure, such as shared resources, reliability, and greener and lower cost operation. From a network architectures perspective, Cloud RAN enables semi-centralized scheduling and network resource-allocation algorithms which can lead to increased network performance in throughput, delay and reliability.
WNCG student Yuhuan Du and Prof. Gustavo de Veciana research the dynamics of radio resource clustering and its effects on wireless networks.
Paper: Wireless Networks Without Edges: Dynamic Radio Resource Clustering and User Scheduling
Presentation slides: Infocom 2014
Extreme Densification
Future mobile devices may be able to choose to connect to one or more of a large number of access points and base stations. The availability of such large numbers of resources, somewhat counter-intuitively, can actually help manage complexity. The intuition is that "sloppy" resource allocation techniques that optimize for robustness and aim to decrease algorithm complexity can perform close to optimum simply because of the flexibility due to the large number of degrees-of-freedom in densified networks.
WNCG student Sharayu Moharir and Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai study how to optimally schedule transmissions in dense, wireless networks.
Device-to-Device (D2D) Integration
Many emerging applications, such as augmented reality and proximal Internet, are critically tied to acquiring and sharing contextual information regarding the environment, devices and people connected to a given location. With such traffic locality, enabling devices to connect directly via liscensed or unliscensed spectrum can substantially increase overall spectrum efficiency, but presents many challenges including discovery, dynamic scheduling, and seamless transitioning back and forth from Device-to-Device (D2D) to infrastructure based connectivity.
WNCG researchers, including Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai, François Bacelli, and collaborators, contribute to the analysis and development of a new class of protocols for D2D link discovery and scheduling that could deliver substantial increases in area spectral efficiency for such applications.
