On Cross-Layer Design and Resource Scheduling in Wireless Networks

Abstract: Wireless technology has revolutionized the world of communications, enabling ubiquitous connectivity and leading every year to several new applications and services embraced by billions of users. To meet the increasing demand for high data-rate wireless services, standardization bodies and vendors released a new generation of standard-based devices capable to offer wide area high-speed and high-quality wireless coverage. More recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have captured the attention of the industry society to migrate substantial parts of the traditionally wired industrial infrastructure to wireless technologies. Despite the increasing appetite for wireless services, the basic physical resource of these systems, the bandwidth, is limited. Therefore, the design of efficient network control mechanisms for optimizing the capabilities of complex networks is becoming an increasingly critical aspect in networking. In this thesis, we explore the application of optimization techniques to resource allocation in wireless systems. We formulate the optimal network operation as the solution to a network utility maximization problem, which highlights how system performance can be improved if the traditionally separated network layers are jointly optimized. The advantage of such cross-layer optimization is twofold: firstly, joint optimization across layers reveals the true performance limits that can be achieved by practical protocols, and is hence useful for network design or performance analysis; secondly, distributed optimization techniques can be used to systematically engineer protocols and signalling schemes that ensure the globally optimal system operation.Within this framework, we consider several challenging problems. The first one considers the design of jointly optimal power and end-to-end rate allocation schemes in multi-hop wireless networks that adhere to the natural time-scales of transport and physical layer mechanisms and impose limited signalling overhead. To validate the theoretical development, we present a detailed implementation of a cross-layer networking stack for DS-CDMA ad-hoc networks in the network simulator ns-2. This implementation exercise reveals several critical issues that arise in practice, but are typically neglected in the theoretical protocol design. Second, we consider networks employing resource scheduling at the data link layer, and we develop detailed distributed solutions for joint end-to-end communication rate selection, multiple time-slot transmission scheduling and power allocation that achieve the optimal network utility. We show with examples how the mathematical framework can be applied to optimize the resource allocation in spatial-reuse time division multiple access (S-TDMA) networks and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. We then make a slight shift in focus, and consider off-line cross-layer optimization to investigate the benefits of various routing strategies in multi-hop networks, and apply these results to a techno-economical feasibility study of cellular relaying networks. Finally, we consider the design of efficient resource scheduling schemes for deadline-constrained real-time traffic in wireless sensor networks. Specifically, we develop theory and algorithms for time- and channel-optimal scheduling of networks operating according to the recent Wireless HART standard.