Mathematical impact of information accuracy on network performance

Many wireless network protocols have to deal with inaccurate information due to the lack of sufficient knowledge of the scenario or other limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we study information accuracy and investigate its quantitative impact on wireless network performance. First, we introduce an entropy-performance framework to model the relationship between wireless network performance and entropy, which characterizes the uncertainty of the input. Under this framework, we quantify the performance variations due to the availability of side information and find that the system performance improvement has a positive linear relationship with the amount of mutual information between input and side information. Subsequently, information accuracy is proposed to reflect the reliability of information. We show that information accuracy has a natural relationship with mutual information and we quantify the impact of information accuracy on wireless network performance. ©2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2010), Cape Town, South Africa, 23-27 May 2010. In Proceedings of ICC, 2010, p. 1-

A framework to analyze network performance based on information quality

Information theory has made great impact on research and development of communication systems. However, research in networking, a system built on communication components, has not benefited much from information theory and a theoretical framework to guide the analysis and design of networks is still lacking. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an information-theoretical framework to explore the quantitative relationship between information and network performance. Another attribute of information, namely information quality (IQ), is proposed to reflect the degree of importance of information to the target performance metric. IQ can be utilized to identify important information, so that network resource can first be allocated to such information, and hence to improve the network performance. Moreover, information efficiency (IE) is proposed as a metric to measure the information efficiency of network protocols and it can be used to analyze and compare the performance of different network protocols. Opportunistic scheduling is used to illustrate our proposed framework. ©2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2010), Cape Town, South Africa, 23-27 May 2010. In Proceedings of ICC, 2010, p. 1-