Delay Constrained Scheduling over Fading Channels: Optimal Policies for Monomial Energy-Cost Functions

A point-to-point discrete-time scheduling problem of transmitting $B$ information bits within $T$ hard delay deadline slots is considered assuming that the underlying energy-bit cost function is a convex monomial. The scheduling objective is to minimize the expected energy expenditure while satisfying the deadline constraint based on information about the unserved bits, channel state/statistics, and the remaining time slots to the deadline. At each time slot, the scheduling decision is made without knowledge of future channel state, and thus there is a tension between serving many bits when the current channel is good versus leaving too many bits for the deadline. Under the assumption that no other packet is scheduled concurrently and no outage is allowed, we derive the optimal scheduling policy. Furthermore, we also investigate the dual problem of maximizing the number of transmitted bits over $T$ time slots when subject to an energy constraint.Comment: submitted to the IEEE ICC 200

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks

MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless networks. This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples, however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability. First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical 0. Abstract 3 function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process, to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management, while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data ferries is investigated

Maximizing Energy Efficiency in Multiple Access Channels by Exploiting Packet Dropping and Transmitter Buffering

Quality of service (QoS) for a network is characterized in terms of various parameters specifying packet delay and loss tolerance requirements for the application. The unpredictable nature of the wireless channel demands for application of certain mechanisms to meet the QoS requirements. Traditionally, medium access control (MAC) and network layers perform these tasks. However, these mechanisms do not take (fading) channel conditions into account. In this paper, we investigate the problem using cross layer techniques where information flow and joint optimization of higher and physical layer is permitted. We propose a scheduling scheme to optimize the energy consumption of a multiuser multi-access system such that QoS constraints in terms of packet loss are fulfilled while the system is able to maximize the advantages emerging from multiuser diversity. Specifically, this work focuses on modeling and analyzing the effects of packet buffering capabilities of the transmitter on the system energy for a packet loss tolerant application. We discuss low complexity schemes which show comparable performance to the proposed scheme. The numerical evaluation reveals useful insights about the coupling effects of different QoS parameters on the system energy consumption and validates our analytical results.Comment: in IEEE trans. Wireless communications, 201