Wireless networks capacity characterization and how to approach it

Abstract

Wireless systems possess attributes fairly different than those that formed the design guidelines of the Internet. Hence, novel approaches are needed for architecting networks that seamlessly integrate wired and wireless components and offer the grade of service people are accustomed to from the Internet. In this talk we will review a number of theoretical advances towards characterizing the capacity of wireless networks and present an optimization based framework towards achieving that capacity. The necessary interaction among the different network layers for realizing those resource allocation algorithms will be discussed while implementation challenges both in terms of computational complexity as well as state information available will be presented. Implications on the scaling properties of those algorithms and the associated network capacity will be given. In the last part of the talk, we will present attributes of prevailing wireless network standards that support the incorporation of optimization based resource allocation algorithms in practical network designs and discuss current approaches.