Instructors: Randall Berry, Northwestern University, USA and Peter Marbach, University of Toronto, Canada

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of high-speed wireless data systems including 3G cellular systems, such as CDMA 1xEVDO and HSDPA, and wireless LAN and MAN technologies such as IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16. Such networks have the potential to support a broad mix of services for mobile users. A key issue for realizing this is to be able to efficiently allocate the available "radio resources" among competing users while taking into account the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of diverse applications. This tutorial will discuss recent advances in the areas of resource allocation and QoS in emerging high-speed wireless data networks. The focus will be on networking issues arising in the transport layer and data link layer. In wire-line networks, there has been significant progress in the last decade on modeling and understanding resource allocation and QoS using ideas from convex optimization and economics. However, in wireless networks these issues are more difficult due to the time-varying fading and interference found in wireless channels. The goal of the tutorial is to provide an overview of problems, models, and results, to illustrate (a) what makes resource allocation and QoS-provisioning in wireless networks more challenging compared with wire-line networks, (b) what are appropriate models used to study these issues, and (c) what algorithms and protocols have been proposed to allow a more efficient operation of wireless networks. We will begin by briefly giving an overview of resource allocation in wire-line networks and discussing the properties of wireless channels that makes resource allocation and QoS-provisioning challenging. We then present various models to study these issues and get a better understanding of the fundamental limits and trade-offs in wireless networks. We will discuss models of wireless channels that provide useful abstractions for resource allocation and take into account effects such as fading, interference and modern link adaptation techniques. The role of different multiplexing approaches such as CDMA, TDMA, as well as random access techniques will also be covered. Finally, we will describe recent results on protocols and algorithms to operate wireless networks more efficiently; in particular, we will focus on channel-aware scheduling in wireless local area networks and cellular networks with time-varying channels, fair bandwidth allocation in cellular CDMA-networks, and rate and delay differentiation in CSMA-based random access networks. Both theoretical performance as well as practical implementations will be discussed.

Randall Berry received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1993 and the M.S. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. During the summer of 2000 he was a postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. In 1998 he was on the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced Networks Group. His primary research interests include wireless communication, data networks, and information theory. He is the recipient of a 2003 NSF CAREER award and the Best Teacher award for the 2001/2002 academic year from the ECE Department at Northwestern University.

Peter Marbach was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. He received the Eidg. Dipl. El.-Ing. (1993) from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, the M.S. (1994) in electrical engineering from the Columbia University, NY, U.S.A, and the Ph.D. (1998) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. He joined in 2000 the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto as an assistant professor. He has also been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Communication Systems Research, University of Cambridge, UK, and a visiting scientist at the Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich. Peter Marbach has received the IEEE INFOCOM 2002 Best Paper Award for his paper "Priority Service and Max-Min Fairness". His research interests are in the fields of communication networks, stochastic systems, optimization, and control.

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