Coordinated load balancing, handoff/cell-site selection, and scheduling in multi-cell packet data systems

We investigate a wireless system of multiple cells, each having a downlink shared channel in support of high-speed packet data services. In practice, such a system consists of hierarchically organized entities including a central server, Base Stations (BSs), and Mobile Stations (MSs). Our goal is to improve global resource utilization and reduce regional congestion given asymmetric arrivals and departures of mobile users, a goal requiring load balancing among multiple cells. For this purpose, we propose a scalable cross-layer framework to coordinate packet-level scheduling, call-level cell-site selection and handoff, and system-level cell coverage based on load, throughput, and channel measurements. In this framework, an opportunistic scheduling algorithm—the weighted Alpha-Rule—exploits the gain of multiuser diversity in each cell independently, trading aggregate (mean) downlink throughput for fairness and minimum rate guarantees among MSs. Each MS adapts to its channel dynamics and the load fluctuations in neighboring cells, in accordance with MSs’ mobility or their arrival and departure, by initiating load-aware handoff and cell-site selection. The central server adjusts schedulers of all cells to coordinate their coverage by prompting cell breathing or distributed MS handoffs. Across the whole system, BSs and MSs constantly monitor their load, throughput, or channel quality in order to facilitate the overall system coordination. Our specific contributions in such a framework are highlighted by the minimum-rate guaranteed weighted Alpha-Rule scheduling, the load-aware MS handoff/cell-site selection, and the Media Access Control (MAC)-layer cell breathing. Our evaluations show that the proposed framework can improve global resource utilization and load balancing, resulting in a smaller blocking rate of MS arrivals without extra resources while the aggregate throughput remains roughly the same or improved at the hot-spots. Our simulation tests also show that the coordinated system is robust to dynamic load fluctuations and is scalable to both the system dimension and the size of MS population. Aimin Sang received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. His Ph.D. dissertation is on the measurement-based traffic management for QoS guarantee in multi-service networks. From May 2000 to July 2002, he was a member of technical staff and software engineer at Santera System Inc., a startup company in designing and implementing the next-generation multi-service gateway. His duty was to design, implement, and test core traffic management algorithms on the switch fabric and control boards, integrating IP routing, ATM switching, and Class 4 and 5 telephony switching functionalities for multi-service Internet access at the Central Offices. From July 2002 to Nov. 2002, he was a post-doc at UT-Austin, researching on VPN provisioning and ad hoc sensor networks. He joined NEC Lab America in Nov. 2002. Dr. Sang is currently a research staff member in Broadband & Mobile Networking Department, NEC Lab. America, focusing on cross-layer design of 4G wireless systems, such as 4G Cellular base station, WiMax/WLAN systems, and their inter-networking architecture. His duty is to develop the core technologies including the radio resource management and QoS schemes over an IP-optimized MC-CDMA or OFCDM/MIMO air interfaces. He is also interested in ad hoc sensor networks and personal area networks. Xiaodong Wang received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics (with the highest honor) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 1992; the M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 1995; and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1998. From July 1998 to December 2001, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University. In January 2002, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University. Dr. Wang’s research interests fall in the general areas of computing, signal processing and communications. He has worked in the areas of digital communications, digital signal processing, parallel and distributed computing, nanoelectronics and bioinformatics, and has published extensively in these areas. Among his publications is a recent book entitled “Wireless Communication Systems: Advanced Techniques for Signal Reception”, published by Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, in 2003. His current research interests include wireless communications, Monte Carlo-based statistical signal processing, and genomic signal processing. Dr. Wang received the 1999 NSF CAREER Award, and the 2001 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Mohammad Madihian received the Ph.D. Degree in Electronic Engineering from Shizuoka University, Japan, in 1983. He joined NEC Central Research Laboratories, Kawasaki, Japan, where he worked on research and development of Si and GaAs device-based digital as well as microwave and millimeter-wave monolithic IC’s. In 1999, he moved to NEC Laboratories America, Inc., Princeton, New Jersey, and is presently the Department Head and Chief Patent Officer. He conducts PHY/MAC layer signal processing activities for high-speed wireless networks and personal communications applications. He has authored or co-authored more than 130 scientific publications including 20 invited talks, and holds 35 Japan/US patents. Dr. Madihian has received the IEEE MTT-S Best Paper Microwave Prize in 1988, and the IEEE Fellow Award in 1998. He holds 8 NEC Distinguished R&D Achievement Awards. He has served as Guest Editor to the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Japan IEICE Transactions on Electronics, and IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques. He is presently serving on the IEEE Speaker’s Bureau, IEEE Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium (CSICS) Executive Committee, IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference Steering Committee, IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) Technical Program Committee, IEEE MTT-6 Subcommittee, IEEE MTT Editorial Board, and Technical Program Committee of International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials (SSDM). Dr. Madihian is an Adjunct Professor at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Richard D. Gitlin Is currently President of Innovatia Networks a wireless startup company and a member of the Board of Directors of PCTEL [NASDAQ: PCTI]. Previously he was Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and Vice President, Technology of NEC Laboratories America. After receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, he was with Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs), where for more than 32 years he held several research and executive positions, including Senior Vice President, Communications Systems Research and Chief Technical Officer and VP of R&D of Lucent’s Data Networking Business Unit. Throughout his career Dr. Gitlin has both personally conducted and led pioneering research and development in digital communications and networking, digital signal processing, wireless systems, and broadband networking that has resulted in many innovative products, including: the industry leading ATLANTA ATM Chipset, the world’s first 20 gigabit/sec ATM switch, wire-speed and quality of service [QoS]-aware IP switches, multicode CDMA (IS-95B), and the record-setting BLAST broadband fixed-wireless loop system based on advanced spatial domain (smart antenna) processing. Earlier in his career he led the team that pioneered the V.32/V.34 voice-band modems, and in 1986 he was a co-inventor of the DSL technology. He has more than 90 referred publications, is the recipient of three prize papers, has delivered numerous keynotes, and he holds 43 US patents, and co-author of the text Data Communications. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Mobile Networks and Applications and the Journal of Communications Networks (JCN). Dr. Gitlin has been elected as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and is a Bell Laboratories Fellow. Dr. Gitlin has served as Chair of the Communication Theory Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, as a member of the COMSOC Awards Board, as Editor for communication theory of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society, and a member of the Nominations and Elections Board. He has served on the Advisory Committee for Computer Science and Engineering (CISE) of the National Science Foundation.     

Performance of a burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol: Analysis and enhancement

In this paper, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the delay performance of the burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol under unsaturated conditions, which has not been fully addressed in the literature. Our delay analysis is unique in that we consider the end-to-end packet delay, which is the duration from the epoch that a packet enters the queue at the MAC layer of the transmitter side to the epoch that the packet is successfully received at the receiver side. The analytical results give excellent agreement with the simulation results, which represents the accuracy of our analytical model. The results also provide important guideline on how to set the parameters of the burst assembly policy. Based on these results, we further develop an efficient adaptive burst assembly policy so as to optimize the throughput and delay performance of the burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol. Kejie Lu received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2003. In 2004 and 2005, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His research interests include architecture and protocols design for computer and communication networks, performance analysis, network security, and wireless communications. Jianfeng Wang received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Florida in 2006. From January 2006 to July 2006, he was a research intern in wireless standards and technology group, Intel Corporation. In October 2006, he joined Philips Research North America as a senior member research staff in wireless communications and networking department. He is engaged in research and standardization on wireless networks with emphasis on medium access control (MAC). Dapeng Wu received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1990, M.E. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1997, and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2003. Since August 2003, he has been with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, as an Assistant Professor. His research interests are in the areas of networking, communications, multimedia, signal processing, and information and network security. He received the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) Transactions Best Paper Award for Year 2001, and the Best Paper Award in International Conference on Quality of Service in Heterogeneous Wired/Wireless Networks (QShine) 2006. Currently, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Advances in Multimedia, and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing. He is also a guest-editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Special Issue on Cross-layer Optimized Wireless Multimedia Communications. He served as Program Chair for IEEE/ACM First International Workshop on Broadband Wireless Services and Applications (BroadWISE 2004); and as a technical program committee member of over 30 conferences. He is Vice Chair of Mobile and wireless multimedia Interest Group (MobIG), Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the Best Paper Award Committee, Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994 and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology from July 1998 to May 2000. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida in May 2000 as an assistant professor and got an early promotion to an associate professor with tenure in August 2003 and to a full professor in August 2005. He has published over 200 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He has served on several editorial boards of technical journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Wireless Networks. He have also been actively participating in professional conference organizations such as serving as The Steering Committee Co-Chair for QShine, the Technical Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Technical Program Symposium Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom’2004, and a member of Technical Program Committee for IEEE INFOCOM (1998, 2000, 2003–2007). He is a senior member of the IEEE.     

Localized algorithms for coverage boundary detection in wireless sensor networks

Connected coverage, which reflects how well a target field is monitored under the base station, is the most important performance metric used to measure the quality of surveillance that wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can provide. To facilitate the measurement of this metric, we propose two novel algorithms for individual sensor nodes to identify whether they are on the coverage boundary, i.e., the boundary of a coverage hole or network partition. Our algorithms are based on two novel computational geometric techniques called localized Voronoi and neighbor embracing polygons. Compared to previous work, our algorithms can be applied to WSNs of arbitrary topologies. The algorithms are fully distributed in the sense that only the minimal position information of one-hop neighbors and a limited number of simple local computations are needed, and thus are of high scalability and energy efficiency. We show the correctness and efficiency of our algorithms by theoretical proofs and extensive simulations. Chi Zhang received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in July 1999 and January 2002, respectively. Since September 2004, he has been working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA. His research interests are network and distributed system security, wireless networking, and mobile computing, with emphasis on mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, and heterogeneous wired/wireless networks. Yanchao Zhang received the B.E. degree in computer communications from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in July 1999, the M.E. degree in computer applications from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in April 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville, in August 2006. Since September 2006, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark. His research interest include wireless and Internet security, wireless networking, and mobile computing. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM. Yuguang Fang received the BS and MS degrees in Mathematics from Qufu Normal University, Qufu, Shandong, China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively, a Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control Engineering from Department of Systems, Control and Industrial Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in January 1994, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, Massachusetts, in May 1997. From 1987 to 1988, he held research and teaching position in both Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Automation at Qufu Normal University. From September 1989 to December 1993, he was a teaching/research assistant in Department of Systems, Control and Industrial Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, where he held a research associate position from January 1994 to May 1994. He held a post-doctoral position in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University from June 1994 to August 1995. From September 1995 to May 1997, he was a research assistant in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. From June 1997 to July 1998, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. From July 1998 to May 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey. In May 2000, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, where he got early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in August 2003, and to Full Professor in August 2005. His research interests span many areas including wireless networks, mobile computing, mobile communications, wireless security, automatic control, and neural networks. He has published over one hundred and fifty (150) papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He also received the 2001 CAST Academic Award. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in World. Dr. Fang has actively engaged in many professional activities. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. He is an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications, an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, an Editor for ACM Wireless Networks, and an Editor for IEEE Wireless Communications. He was an Editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications:Wireless Communications Series, an Area Editor for ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, an Editor for Wiley International Journal on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, and Feature Editor for Scanning the Literature in IEEE Personal Communications. He has also actively involved with many professional conferences such as ACM MobiCom’02 (Committee Co-Chair for Student Travel Award), MobiCom’01, IEEE INFOCOM’06, INFOCOM’05 (Vice-Chair for Technical Program Committee), INFOCOM’04, INFOCOM’03, INFOCOM’00, INFOCOM’98, IEEE WCNC’04, WCNC’02, WCNC’00 Technical Program Vice-Chair), WCNC’99, IEEE Globecom’04 (Symposium Co-Chair), Globecom’02, and International Conference on Computer Communications and Networking (IC3N) (Technical Program Vice-Chair).     

Cross-layer modeling of adaptive wireless links for QoS support in heterogeneous wired-wireless networks

Future wired-wireless multimedia networks require diverse quality-of-service (QoS) support. To this end, it is essential to rely on QoS metrics pertinent to wireless links. In this paper, we develop a cross-layer model for adaptive wireless links, which enables derivation of the desired QoS metrics analytically from the typical wireless parameters across the hardware-radio layer, the physical layer and the data link layer. We illustrate the advantages of our model: generality, simplicity, scalability and backward compatibility. Finally, we outline its applications to power control, TCP, UDP and bandwidth scheduling in wireless networks. The work by Q. Liu and G. B. Giannakis are prepared through collaborative participation in the Communications and Networks Consortium sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The work by S. Zhou is supported by UConn Research Foundation internal grant 445157. Qingwen Liu (S’04) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and information science in 2001, from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, from the University of Minnesota (UMN). He currently pursues his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota (UMN). His research interests lie in the areas of communications, signal processing, and networking, with emphasis on cross-layer analysis and design, quality of service support for multimedia applications over wired-wireless networks, and resource allocation. Shengli Zhou (M’03) received the B.S. degree in 1995 and the M.Sc. degree in 1998, from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), both in electrical engineering and information science. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, 2002, and joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut, 2003. His research interests lie in the areas of communications and signal processing, including channel estimation and equalization, multi-user and multi-carrier communications, space time coding, adaptive modulation, and cross-layer designs. He serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications since Feb. 2005. G. B. Giannakis (Fellow’97) received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1981. From September 1982 to July 1986 he was with the University of Southern California (USC), where he received his MSc. in Electrical Engineering, 1983, MSc. in Mathematics, 1986, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, 1986. After lecturing for one year at USC, he joined the University of Virginia in 1987, where he became a professor of Electrical Engineering in 1997. Since 1999 he has been a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he now holds an ADC Chair in Wireless Telecommunications. His general interests span the areas of communications and signal processing, estimation and detection theory, time-series analysis, and system identification -- subjects on which he has published more than 200 journal papers, 350 conference papers and two edited books. Current research focuses on transmitter and receiver diversity techniques for single- and multi-user fading communication channels, complex-field and space-time coding, multicarrier, ultra-wide band wireless communication systems, cross-layer designs and sensor networks. G. B. Giannakis is the (co-) recipient of six paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) and Communications Societies (1992, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004). He also received the SP Society’s Technical Achievement Award in 2000. He served as Editor in Chief for the IEEE SP Letters, as Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Signal Proc. and the IEEE SP Letters, as secretary of the SP Conference Board, as member of the SP Publications Board, as member and vice-chair of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing Technical Committee, as chair of the SP for Communications Technical Committee and as a member of the IEEE Fellows Election Committee. He has also served as a member of the IEEE-SP Society’s Board of Governors, the Editorial Board for the Proceedings of the IEEE and the steering committee of the IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications.     

Effective Capacity-Based Quality of Service Measures for Wireless Networks

An important objective of next-generation wireless networks is to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees. This requires a simple and efficient wireless channel model that can easily translate into connection-level QoS measures such as data rate, delay and delay-violation probability. To achieve this, in Wu and Negi (IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications 2(4) (2003) 630–643), we developed a link-layer channel model termed effective capacity, for the setting of a single hop, constant-bit-rate arrivals, fluid traffic, and wireless channels with negligible propagation delay. In this paper, we apply the effective capacity technique to deriving QoS measures for more general situations, namely, (1) networks with multiple wireless links, (2) variable-bit-rate sources, (3) packetized traffic, and (4) wireless channels with non-negligible propagation delay. Dapeng Wu received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1990, M.E. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1997, and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2003. From July 1997 to December 1999, he conducted graduate research at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York. During the summers of 1998, 1999 and 2000, he conducted research at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Sunnyvale, California, on architectures and traffic management algorithms in the Internet and wireless networks for multimedia applications. Since August 2003, he has been with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, as an Assistant Professor. His research interests are in the areas of networking, communications, multimedia, signal processing, and information and network security. He received the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) Transactions Best Paper Award for Year 2001. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and Associate Editor for International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing. He served as Program Chair for IEEE/ACM First International Workshop on Broadband Wireless Services and Applications (BroadWISE 2004); and as TPC member of over 20 conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM'05, IEEE ICC'05, IEEE WCNC'05, and IEEE Globecom'04. He is Vice Chair of Mobile and wireless multimedia Interest Group (MobIG), Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the Award Committee, Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is also Director of Communications, IEEE Gainesville Section. Rohit Negi received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1995. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, CA, USA, in 1996 and 2000 respectively, both in Electrical Engineering. He has received the President of India Gold medal in 1995. Since 2000, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, where he is an Assistant Professor. His research interests include signal processing, coding for communications systems, information theory, networking, cross-layer optimization and sensor networks.     

QoS-driven asynchronous uplink subchannel allocation algorithms for space-time OFDM-CDMA systems in wireless networks

In order to support the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for differentiated data applications in broadband wireless networks, advanced techniques such as space-time coding (STC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are implemented at the physical layer. However, the employment of such techniques evidently affects the subchannel-allocation algorithms at the medium access control (MAC) layer. In this paper, we propose the QoS-driven cross-layer subchannel-allocation algorithms for data transmissions over asynchronous uplink space-time OFDM-CDMA wireless networks. We mainly focus on QoS requirements of maximizing the best-effort throughput and proportional bandwidth fairness, while minimizing the upper-bound of scheduling delay. Our extensive simulations show that the proposed infrastructure and algorithms can achieve high bandwidth fairness and system throughput while reducing scheduling delay over wireless networks. Xi Zhang (S’89-SM’98) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, the M.S. degree from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, all in electrical engineering and computer science, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (Electrical Engineering—Systems) from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He is currently an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. He was an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Division of Computer Systems Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Beijing Information Technology Engineering Institute, Beijing, China, from 1984 to 1989. He was a Research Fellow with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, under a Fellowship from the Chinese National Commission of Education. He worked as a Summer Intern with the Networks and Distributed Systems Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hills, NJ, and with AT&T Laboratories Research, Florham Park, NJ, in 1997. He has published more than 80 technical papers. His current research interests focus on the areas of wireless networks and communications, mobile computing, cross-layer designs and optimizations for QoS guarantees over mobile wireless networks, wireless sensor and Ad Hoc networks, wireless and wireline network security, network protocols design and modeling for QoS guarantees over multicast (and unicast) wireless (and wireline) networks, statistical communications theory, random signal processing, and distributed computer-control systems. Dr. Zhang received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004 for his research in the areas of mobile wireless and multicast networking and systems. He is currently serving as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Associated Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and and Associated Editor for the IEEE Communications Letters, and is also currently serving as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine for the Special Issues of “Next Generation of CDMA vs. OFDMA for 4G Wireless Applications”. He has served or is serving as the Panelist on the U.S. National Science Foundation Research-Proposal Review Panel in 2004, the WiFi-Hotspots/WLAN and QoS Panelist at the IEEE QShine 2004, as the Symposium Chair for the IEEE International Cross-Layer Designs and Protocols Symposium within the IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC) 2006, the Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the IEEE IWCMC 2006, the Poster Chair for the IEEE QShine 2006, the Publicity Co-Chair for the IEEE WirelessCom 2005, and as the Technical Program Committee members for IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE WCNC, IEEE VTC, IEEE QShine, IEEE WoWMoM, IEEE WirelessCom, and IEEE EIT. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Jia Tang (S’03) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, in 2001. He is currently a Research Assistant working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. His research interests include mobile wireless communications and networks, with emphasis on cross-layer design and optimizations, wireless quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for mobile multimedia networks, wireless diversity techniques, and wireless resource allocation. Mr. Tang received the Fouraker Graduate Research Fellowship Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University in 2005.     

A secure authentication and billing architecture for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining growing interest as a promising technology for ubiquitous high-speed network access. While much effort has been made to address issues at physical, data link, and network layers, little attention has been paid to the security aspect central to the realistic deployment of WMNs. We propose UPASS, the first known secure authentication and billing architecture for large-scale WMNs. UPASS features a novel user-broker-operator trust model built upon the conventional certificate-based cryptography and the emerging ID-based cryptography. Based on the trust model, each user is furnished with a universal pass whereby to realize seamless roaming across WMN domains and get ubiquitous network access. In UPASS, the incontestable billing of mobile users is fulfilled through a lightweight realtime micropayment protocol built on the combination of digital signature and one-way hash-chain techniques. Compared to conventional solutions relying on a home-foreign-domain concept, UPASS eliminates the need for establishing bilateral roaming agreements and having realtime interactions between potentially numerous WMN operators. Our UPASS is shown to be secure and lightweight, and thus can be a practical and effective solution for future large-scale WMNs. Yanchao Zhang received the B.E. degree in Computer Communications from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in July 1999, and the M.E. degree in Computer Applications from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in April 2002. Since September 2002, he has been working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA. His research interests are network and distributed system security, wireless networking, and mobile computing, with emphasis on mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, and heterogeneous wired/wireless networks. Yuguang Fang received the BS and MS degrees in Mathematics from Qufu Normal University, Qufu, Shandong, China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively, a Ph.D degree in Systems and Control Engineering from Department of Systems, Control and Industrial Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in January 1994, and a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, Massachusetts, in May 1997. From 1987 to 1988, he held research and teaching position in both Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Automation at Qufu Normal University. From September 1989 to December 1993, he was a teaching/research assistant in Department of Systems, Control and Industrial Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, where he held a research associate position from January 1994 to May 1994. He held a post-doctoral position in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University from June 1994 to August 1995. From September 1995 to May 1997, he was a research assistant in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. From June 1997 to July 1998, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. From July 1998 to May 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey. In May 2000, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, where he got early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in August 2003, and to Full Professor in August 2005. His research interests span many areas including wireless networks, mobile computing, mobile communications, wireless security, automatic control, and neural networks. He has published over one hundred and fifty (150) papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He also received the 2001 CAST Academic Award. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in World. Dr. Fang has actively engaged in many professional activities. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. He is an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications, an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, an Editor for ACM Wireless Networks, and an Editor for IEEE Wireless Communications. He was an Editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications: Wireless Communications Series, an Area Editor for ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, an Editor for Wiley International Journal on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, and Feature Editor for Scanning the Literature in IEEE Personal Communications. He has also actively involved with many professional conferences such as ACM MobiCom’02 (Committee Co-Chair for Student Travel Award), MobiCom’01, IEEE INFOCOM’06, INFOCOM’05 (Vice-Chair for Technical Program Committee), INFOCOM’04, INFOCOM’03, INFOCOM’00, INFOCOM’98, IEEE WCNC’04, WCNC’02, WCNC’00 (Technical Program Vice-Chair), WCNC’99, IEEE Globecom’04 (Symposium Co-Chair), Globecom’02, and International Conference on Computer Communications and Networking (IC3N) (Technical Program Vice-Chair).     

Cross-layer radio resource allocation in packet CDMA wireless mobile networks

An efficient radio resource allocation scheme is crucial for guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) requirements and fully utilizing the scarce radio resources in wireless mobile networks. Most of previous studies of radio resource allocation in traditional wireless networks concentrates on network layer connection blocking probability QoS. In this paper, we show that physical layer techniques and QoS have significant impacts on network layer QoS. We use a concept of cross-layer effective bandwidth to measure the unified radio resource usage taking into account both physical layer linear minimum-mean square error (LMMSE) receivers and varying statistical characteristics of the packet traffic in code devision multiple access (CDMA) networks. We demonstrate the similarity between traditional circuit-switched networks and packet CDMA networks, which enables rich theories developed in traditional wireless mobile networks to be used in packet CDMA networks. Moreover, since both physical layer signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) QoS and network layer connection blocking probability QoS are considered simultaneously, we can explore the tradeoff between physical layer QoS and network layer QoS in packet CDMA networks. This work is supported by Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Please address all correspondence to Professor Vikram Krishnamurthy at the above address. Fei Yu received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia in 2003. From 2002 to 2004, he was with Ericsson (in Lund, Sweden), where he worked on the research and development of dual mode UMTS/GPRS handsets. From 2005, he has been working in Silicon Valley at a start-up, where he conducts research and development in the areas of advanced wireless communication technologies and new standards. After completing the PhD, he has been a research associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include cross-layer optimization, QoS provisioning and security in wireless networks. Vikram Krishnamurthy (S’90-M’91-SM’99-F’05) was born in 1966. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1988, and Ph.D. from the Australian National University, Canberra, in 1992. Since 2002, he has been a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Prior to this he was a chaired professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests span several areas including ion channels and nanobiology, stochastic scheduling and control, statistical signal processing and wireless telecommunications. Dr. Krishnamurthy has served as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Transactions Nanobioscience, IEEE Transactions Circuits and Systems II, Systems and Control Letters and European Journal of Applied Signal Processing. He was guest editor of a special issue of IEEE Transactions on NanoBioScience, March 2005 on bio-nanotubes.     

Effective capacity channel model for frequency-selective fading channels

To efficiently support quality of service (QoS) in future wireless networks, it is important to model a wireless channel in terms of connection-level QoS metrics such as data rate, delay and delay-violation probability. To achieve this, in [7], we proposed and developed a link-layer channel model termed effective capacity (EC) for flat fading channels. In this paper, we apply the effective capacity technique to modeling frequency selective fading channels. Specifically, we utilize the duality between the distribution of a queue with superposition of N i.i.d. sources, and the distribution of a queue with a frequency-selective fading channel that consists of N i.i.d. sub-channels, to model a frequency selective fading channel. In the proposed model, a frequency selective fading channel is modeled by three EC functions; we also propose a simple and efficient algorithm to estimate these EC functions. Simulation results show that the actual QoS metric is closely approximated by the QoS metric predicted by the proposed EC channel model. The accuracy of the prediction using our model can translate into efficiency in admission control and resource reservation. Dapeng Wu received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1990, M.E. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1997, and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2003. From July 1997 to December 1999, he conducted graduate research at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York. During the summers of 1998, 1999 and 2000, he conducted research at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Sunnyvale, California, on architectures and traffic management algorithms in the Internet and wireless networks for multimedia applications. Since August 2003, he has been with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, as an Assistant Professor. His research interests are in the areas of networking, communications, multimedia, signal processing, and information and network security. He received the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) Transactions Best Paper Award for Year 2001. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and Associate Editor for International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing. He served as Program Chair for IEEE/ACM First International Workshop on Broadband Wireless Services and Applications (BroadWISE 2004); and as TPC member of over 30 conferences. He is Vice Chair of Mobile and wireless multimedia Interest Group (MobIG), Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the Best Paper Award Committee, Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is also Director of Communications, IEEE Gainesville Section. Rohit Negi received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1995. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, CA, USA, in 1996 and 2000 respectively, both in Electrical Engineering. He has received the President of India Gold medal in 1995. Since 2000, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, where he is an Associate Professor. His research interests include signal processing, coding for communications systems, information theory, networking, cross-layer optimization and sensor networks.     

Statistical multiplexing, admission region, and contention window optimization in multiclass wireless LANs

This paper presents an analytical model for evaluating the statistical multiplexing effect, admission region, and contention window design in multiclass wireless local area networks (WLANs). We consider distributed medium access control (MAC) which provisions service differentiation by assigning different contention windows to different classes. Mobile nodes belonging to different classes may have heterogeneous traffic arrival processes with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. With bursty input traffic, e.g. on/off sources, our analysis shows that the WLAN admission region under the QoS constraint can be significantly improved, when the statistical multiplexing effect is taken into account. We also analyze the MAC resource sharing between the short-range dependent (SRD) on/off sources and the long-range dependent (LRD) fractional Brownian motion (FBM) traffic, where the impact of the Hurst parameter on the admission region is investigated. Moveover, we demonstrate that the proper selection of contention windows plays an important role in improving the WLAN’s QoS capability, while the optimal contention window for each class and the maximum admission region can be jointly solved in our analytical model. The analysis accuracy and the resource utilization improvement from statistical multiplexing gain and contention window optimization are demonstrated by extensive numerical results. Yu Cheng received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995 and 1998, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 2003. From September 2004 to July 2006, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Since August 2006, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, USA, as an Assistant Professor. His research interests include service and application oriented networking, autonomic network management, Internet performance analysis, resource allocation, wireless networks, and wireless/wireline interworking. He received a Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in 2004. Xinhua Ling received the B. Eng. degree in Radio Engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China in 1993 and the M. Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore, Singapore in 2001. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. From 1993 to 1998, he was an R&D Engineer in Beijing Institute of Radio Measurement, China. From February 2001 to September 2002, he was with the Centre for Wireless Communications (currently Institute for Infocom Research), Singapore, as a Senior R&D Engineer, developing the protocol stack for UE in the UMTS system. His general research interests are in the areas of cellular, WLAN, WPAN, mesh and ad hoc networks and their internetworking, focusing on protocol design and performance analysis. Lin X. Cai received the B.Sc. degree in computer science from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 1996 and the MASc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, in 2005. She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the same field at the University of Waterloo. Her current research interests include network performance analysis and protocol design for multimedia applications over wireless networks. Wei Song received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Hebei University, China, in 1998 and the M.S. degree in computer science from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, in 2001. She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her current research interests include resource allocation and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for the integrated cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs). Weihua Zhuang received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Since October 1993, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada, where she is a Professor. Dr. Zhuang is a co-author of the textbook Wireless Communications and Networking (Prentice Hall, 2003). Her current research interests include multimedia wireless communications, wireless networks, and radio positioning. She received the Outstanding Performance Award in 2005 and 2006 from the University of Waterloo and the Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2001 from the Ontario Government for demonstrated excellence of scientific and academic contributions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Xuemin (Sherman) Shen received the B.Sc.(1982) degree from Dalian Maritime University (China) and the M.Sc. (1987) and Ph.D. degrees (1990) from Rutgers University, New Jersey (USA), all in electrical engineering. He is a Professor and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada. His research focuses on mobility and resource management in interconnected wireless/wired networks, UWB wireless communications systems, wireless security, and ad hoc and sensor networks. He is a co-author of three books, and has published more than 300 papers and book chapters in wireless communications and networks, control and filtering. Dr. Shen serves as the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE Globecom’07, General Co-Chair for Chinacom’07 and QShine’06, the Founding Chair for IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on P2P Communications and Networking. He also serves as a Founding Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications; Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology; KICS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks; Computer Networks (Elsevier); ACM/Wireless Networks; and Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (John Wiley), etc. He has also served as Guest Editor for IEEE JSAC, IEEE Wireless Communications, and IEEE Communications Magazine. Dr. Shen received the Excellent Graduate Supervision Award in 2006, and the Outstanding Performance Award in 2004 from the University of Waterloo, the Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2003 from the Province of Ontario, Canada, and the Distinguished Performance Award in 2002 from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo. Dr. Shen is a registered Professional Engineer of Ontario, Canada. Alberto Leon-Garcia received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, in 1973, 1974, and 1976 respectively. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, ON, Canada, and he currently holds the Nortel Institute Chair in Network Architecture and Services. In 1999 he became an IEEE fellow for “For contributions to multiplexing and switching of integrated services traffic”. Dr. Leon-Garcia was Editor for Voice/Data Networks for the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 1983 to 1988 and Editor for the IEEE Information Theory Newsletter from 1982 to 1984. He was Guest Editor of the September 1986 Special Issue on Performance Evaluation of Communications Networks of the IEEE Selected Areas on Communications. He is also author of the textbooks Probability and Random Processes for Electrical Engineering (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley), and Communication Networks: Fundamental Concepts and Key Architectures (McGraw-Hill), co-authored with Dr. Indra Widjaja.     

Auction-Based Spectrum Sharing

We study auction mechanisms for sharing spectrum among a group of users, subject to a constraint on the interference temperature at a measurement point. The users access the channel using spread spectrum signaling and so interfere with each other. Each user receives a utility that is a function of the received signal-to-interference plus noise ratio. We propose two auction mechanisms for allocating the received power. The first is an auction in which users are charged for received SINR, which, when combined with logarithmic utilities, leads to a weighted max-min fair SINR allocation. The second is an auction in which users are charged for power, which maximizes the total utility when the bandwidth is large enough and the receivers are co-located. Both auction mechanisms are shown to be socially optimal for a limiting “large system” with co-located receivers, where bandwidth, power and the number of users are increased in fixed proportion. We also formulate an iterative and distributed bid updating algorithm, and specify conditions under which this algorithm converges globally to the Nash equilibrium of the auction. This work was supported by the Northwestern-Motorola Center for Communications and by NSF CAREER award CCR-0238382. This paper was presented in part at the 2nd Workshop on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt’04), Cambridge, UK, March 24–26, 2004, and the 42nd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, Monticello, IL, USA, September 29 - October 1, 2004. Jianwei Huang received the B.E. degree in Radio Engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China in 2000, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He is currently a Postdoc Research Association in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Prinston university, NJ. In 2004 and 2005, he also worked in the Mathematics of Communication Networks Group at Motorola, Arlington Heights, IL USA as a software engineer. His current research interests lie in the areas of wireless and wireline communications networks, with emphases on resource allocation, network pricing, dynamic spectrum sharing, mobile ad hoc and sensor networks, stochastics and non-convex optimizations. Dr. Huang is the receipt of a 2001 Walter P. Murphy Fellowship at Northwestern University, and a 1999 Chinese National Excellent Student Award. Randall A. Berry received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1993 and the M.S. and Ph.D. 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 Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. 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. Michael L. Honig received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1977, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978 and 1981, respectively. He subsequently joined Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, where he worked on local area networks and voiceband data transmission. In 1983 he joined the Systems Principles Research Division at Bellcore, where he worked on Digital Subscriber Lines and wireless communications. Since the Fall of 1994, he has been with Northwestern University where he is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He has held visiting scholar positions at the Naval Research Laboratory (San Diego), the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Sydney, and Princeton University. He has also worked as a free-lance trombonist. Dr. Honig has served as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (1998-2000) and the IEEE Transactions on Communications (1990-1995), and was a guest editor for the European Transactions on Telecommunications and Wireless Personal Communications. He has also served as a member of the Digital Signal Processing Technical Committee for the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and as a member of the Board of Governors for the Information Theory Society (1997-2002). He is the co-recipient of the 2002 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, and is a Fellow of IEEE.     

Multiconstrained QoS multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

Sensor nodes are densely deployed to accomplish various applications because of the inexpensive cost and small size. Depending on different applications, the traffic in the wireless sensor networks may be mixed with time-sensitive packets and reliability-demanding packets. Therefore, QoS routing is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. Our goal is to provide soft-QoS to different packets as path information is not readily available in wireless networks. In this paper, we utilize the multiple paths between the source and sink pairs for QoS provisioning. Unlike E2E QoS schemes, soft-QoS mapped into links on a path is provided based on local link state information. By the estimation and approximation of path quality, traditional NP-complete QoS problem can be transformed to a modest problem. The idea is to formulate the optimization problem as a probabilistic programming, then based on some approximation technique, we convert it into a deterministic linear programming, which is much easier and convenient to solve. More importantly, the resulting solution is also one to the original probabilistic programming. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant DBI-0529012, the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award under grant ANI-0093241 and the Office of Naval Research under Young Investigator Award N000140210464. Xiaoxia Huang received her BS and MS in the Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2000 and 2002, respectively. She is completing her Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research interests include mobile computing, QoS and routing in wireless ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994 and a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology from July 1998 to May 2000. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida in May 2000 as an assistant professor, got an early promotion to an associate professor with tenure in August 2003 and to a full professor in August 2005. He holds a University of Florida Research Foundation (UFRF) Professorship from 2006 to 2009. He has published over 200 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He has served on several editorial boards of technical journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Wireless Networks. He have also been activitely participating in professional conference organizations such as serving as The Steering Committee Co-Chair for QShine, the Technical Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Technical Program Symposium Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom’2004, and a member of Technical Program Committee for IEEE INFOCOM (1998, 2000, 2003–2007).     

Location-aware resource management in mobile ad hoc networks

We propose an innovative resource management scheme for TDMA based mobile ad hoc networks. Since communications between some important nodes in the network are more critical, they should be accepted by the network with high priority in terms of network resource usage and quality of service (QoS) support. In this scheme, we design a location-aware bandwidth pre-reservation mechanism, which takes advantage of each mobile node’s geographic location information to pre-reserve bandwidth for such high priority connections and thus greatly reduces potential scheduling conflicts for transmissions. In addition, an end-to-end bandwidth calculation and reservation algorithm is proposed to make use of the pre-reserved bandwidth. In this way, time slot collisions among different connections and in adjacent wireless links along a connection can be reduced so that more high priority connections can be accepted into the network without seriously hurting admissions of other connections. The salient feature of our scheme is the collaboration between the routing and MAC layer that results in the more efficient spatial reuse of limited resources, which demonstrates how cross-layer design leads to better performance in QoS support. Extensive simulations show that our scheme can successfully provide better communication quality to important nodes at a relatively low price. Finally, several design issues and future work are discussed. Xiang Chen received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Afterwards, he worked as a MTS (member of technical staff) in Bell Laboratories, Beijing, China. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. His research is focused on protocol design and performance evaluation in wireless networks, including cellular networks, wireless LANs, and mobile ad hoc networks. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and a student member of IEEE. Wei Liu received the BE and ME degrees in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He is currently pursuing the P.hD. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, where he is a research assistant in the Wireless Networks Laboratory (WINET). His research interest includes QoS, secure and power efficient routing, and MAC protocols in mobile ad hoc networks and sensor networks. He is a student member of the IEEE. Hongqiang Zhai received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in July 1999 and January 2002 respectively. He worked as a research intern in Bell Labs Research China from June 2001 to December 2001, and in Microsoft Research Asia from January 2002 to July 2002. Currently he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida. He is a student member of IEEE. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. From June 1997 to July 1998, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. From July 1998 to May 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In May 2000, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida where he got the early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in August 2003 and to Full Professor in August 2005. He has published over 180 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He is currently serving as an Editor for many journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEETransactions on Mobile Computing, and ACM Wireless Networks. He is also actively participating in conference organization such as the Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Program Co-Chair for the Global Internet and Next Generation Networks Symposium in IEEE Globecom’2004 and the Program Vice Chair for 2000 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’2000).     

Performance of Multilayered Video Encoding and Delivery over Lossy Channels Using a Joint Source-Channel Coding Approach

In this paper, the performance of selected error-control schemes based on forward error-control (FEC) coding for H.263+ video transmission over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is studied. Joint source and channel coding (JSCC) techniques that employ single-layer and 2-layer H.263+ coding in conjunction with unequal error protection (UEP) to combat channel errors are quantitatively compared. Results indicate that with appropriate joint source and channel coding, tailored to the respective layers, FEC-based error control in combination with 2-layer video coding techniques can lead to more acceptable quality for wireless video delivery in the presence of channel impairments. Yong Pei is currently a tenure-track assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Wright State University, Dayton, OH. Previously he was a visiting assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL. He received his B.S. degree in electrical power engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 1996, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. His research interests include information theory, wireless communication systems and networks, and image/video compression and communications. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. James W. Modestino (S′67- M′73- SM′81- F′87) was born in Boston, MA, on April 27, 1940. He received the B.S. degree from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, in 1962, and the M.S. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 1964, both in electrical engineering. He also received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1968 and 1969, respectively. He has held a number of industrial positions, including positions with RCA Communications Systems Division, Camden, NJ; General Electronic Laboratories, Cambridge, MA; AVCO Systems Division, Wilmington, MA; GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA; and MIT Lincoln Laboratories, Lexington, MA. From 1970 to 1972, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Northeastern University. In 1972, he joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, where until leaving in 2002 he was an Institute Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department and Director of the Center for Image Processing Research. He has been responsible for teaching and research in the communication, information and signal processing systems area. His specific research interests include communication in fading dispersive channels; detection, estimation and filtering in impulsive or burst noise environments; digital signal, image and video processing; and multimedia communication systems and networks. In 2002 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, as the Victor E. Clarke Endowed Scholar, Professor and Chair. He has held visiting positions with the University of California at San Diego, LaJolla, CA (1981–1982); GE Research and Development Center, Schenectady, NY (1988–1989); and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (1995–1996). Dr. Modestino is a past member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Group. He is a past Associate Editor and Book Review Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. In 1984, he was co-recipient of the Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society and in 2000 he was co-recipient of the best paper award at the International Packet Video Conference.     

HISNs: Distributed gateways for application-level integration of heterogeneous wireless networks

Integration of different kinds of wireless networks to provide people seamless and continuous network access services is a major issue in the B3G network. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel Heterogeneous network Integration Support Node design (HISN) and a distributed HISN network architecture for the integration of heterogeneous networks, under which the Session Mobility, Personal Mobility, and Terminal Mobility for mobile users can be maintained through the Session Management mechanism. Thus, the HISN node can serve as an agent for the user to access Internet services independent of underlying communication infrastructure. Our design is transparent to the bearer networks and the deployment of the HISN network does not need to involve the operators of the heterogeneous wireless networks. This paper is an extension of the work that won the championship of the Mobile Hero contest sponsored by Industrial Development Bureau of Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan, R.O.C., and was awarded USD 30,000. The work of Lin, Chang and Cheng was supported in part by the National Science Council (NSC), R.O.C, under the contract number NSC94-2213-E-002-083 and NSC94-2213-E-002-090, and NSC 94-2627-E-002-001, Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), R.O.C., under contract number 93-EC-17-A-05-S1-0017, the Computer and Communications Researches Labs/Industrial Technology Research Institute (CCL/ITRL), Chunghwa Telecom Labs, Telcordia Applied Research Center, Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC), and Microsoft Corporation, Taiwan. The work of Fang was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award under grant ANI-0093241 and US National Science Foundation under grant DBI-0529012. Phone Lin (M’02-SM’06) received his BSCSIE degree and Ph.D. degree from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, R.O.C. in 1996 and 2001, respectively. From August 2001 to July 2004, he was an Assistant Professor in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE), National Taiwan University, R.O.C. Since August 2004, he has been an Associate Professor in Department of CSIE and Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, R.O.C. His current research interests include personal communications services, wireless Internet, and performance modeling. Dr. Lin is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, a Guest Editor for IEEE Wireless Communications special issue on Mobility and Resource Management, and a Guest Editor for ACM/Springer MONET special issue on Wireless Broad Access. He is also an Associate Editorial Member for the WCMC Journal. P. Lin’s email and website addresses are plin@csie.ntu.edu.tw and http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/∼plin, respectively. Huan-Ming Chang received the BSCSIE degree and Master CSIE degree from National Taiwan University, R.O.C. in 2003 and 2005, respectively. His current research interest includes wireless Internet. H.-M. Chang’s email address is r91114@csie.ntu.edu.tw. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. From June 1997 to July 1998, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. From July 1998 to May 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In May 2000, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida where he got the early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in August 2003 and to Full Professor in August 2005. He has published over 180 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He is currently serving as an Editor for many journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and ACM Wireless Networks. He is also actively participating in conference organization such as the Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Program Co-Chair for the Global Internet and Next Generation Networks Symposium in IEEE Globecom’2004 and the Program Vice Chair for 2000 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’2000). Shin-Ming Cheng received the BSCSIE degree in 2000 from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, R.O.C., where he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University. His current research interests include mobile computing, personal communications services, and wireless Internet. S.-M. Cheng’s email and website addresses are shimi@pcs.csie.ntu.edu.tw and http://www.pcs.csie.ntu.edu.tw/∼shimi, respectively.     

Design and Implementation of Flexible Resampling Mechanism for High-Speed Parallel Particle Filters

There are many applications in which particle filters outperform traditional signal processing algorithms. Some of these applications include tracking, joint detection and estimation in wireless communication, and computer vision. However, particle filters are not used in practice for these applications mainly because they cannot satisfy real-time requirements. This paper presents an efficient resampling architecture for parallel particle filtering. The proposed architecture is flexible such that it supports various modes of parallel resampling operations with up to four processing elements. The resampling algorithm is developed in order to compensate for possible error caused by finite precision quantization in the resampling step. Communication between the processing elements after resampling is identified as an implementation bottleneck, and therefore, concurrent buffering is incorporated in order to speed up communication of particles among processing elements. The flexible resampling mechanism is implemented in 0.35 μ m CMOS process and its complexity and performance are analyzed. Sangjin Hong received the B.S and M.S degrees in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D in EECS from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently with the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Before joining SUNY, he has worked at Ford Aerospace Corp. Computer Systems Division as a systems engineer. He also worked at Samsung Electronics in Korea as a technical consultant. His current research interests are in the areas of low power VLSI design of multimedia wireless communications and digital signal processing systems, reconfigurable SoC design and optimization, VLSI signal processing, and low-complexity digital circuits. Prof. Hong served on numerous Technical Program Committees for IEEE conferences. Prof. Hong is a Senior Member of IEEE. Shu-Shin Chin was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC, in 1974. He received his M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Stony Brook University – State University of New York in 1999 and 2004, respectively. His research interests include low-power digital circuits, and coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures for high-performance DSP systems. Miodrag Bolić received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1996 and 2001, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stony Brook University, NY, USA. He is currently with the School of Information Technology and Engineering at the University of Ottawa, Canada. From 1996 to 2000 he was Research Associate with the Institute of Nuclear Science Vinĉa, Yugoslavia. From 2001 to 2004 he worked part-time at Symbol Technologies Inc., NY, USA. His research is related to VLSI architectures for digital signal processing and signal processing in wireless communications and tracking. Petar M. Djurić received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, in 1981 and 1986, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rhode Island, in 1990. From 1981 to 1986 he was Research Associate with the Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Vinĉa, Belgrade. Since 1990 he has been with Stony Brook University, where he is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He works in the area of statistical signal processing, and his primary interests are in the theory of modeling, detection, estimation, and time series analysis and its application to a wide variety of disciplines including wireless communications and bio-medicine. Prof. Djurić has served on numerous Technical Committees for the IEEE and SPIE and has been invited to lecture at universities in the US and overseas. He is the Area Editor of Special Issues of the Signal Processing Magazine, the Treasurer of the IEEE Signal Processing Conference Board, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He is also the Chair elect of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Committee on Signal Processing—Theory and Methods, and an Editorial Board member of Digital Signal Processing, the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing and the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. Prof. Djurić is a Member of the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.     

Interactive Content-aware Video Streaming System with Fine Granularity Scalability

Video streaming with varying transmission bandwidth is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, an interactive video streaming system is proposed. Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) is applied to be the streaming video format. The computational complexity of FGS coding is analyzed to explore an efficient FGS implementation. A new transmission model is proposed for the realization of a content-aware video streaming. At encoder side, the current MPEG-4 FGS coding flow is reordered such that the picture-level maximum can be acquired in advance and bit-plane data can be dynamically adapted. With these proposed hardware-oriented optimization approaches, a hardwired FGS block-level processing core is proposed to achieve a cost-effective solution to FGS implementation. The streaming server can adaptively decide quality-enhanced region by selective enhancement according to both object information from encoding side and user-defined region from receiver side. From the simulation results, it’s demonstrated that the proposed approach can provide better quality in users’ interest regions with no bit-rate or complexity overhead. Yung-Chi Chang was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1975. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1998, 2000, and 2005, respectively. He serves as senior engineer in SoC Solutions Dept., Vivotek Inc. now. His research interests include video coding algorithms and VLSI architectures for image/video processing. Chih-Wei Hsu was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1979. He received the B.S.E.E and M.S.E.E degrees from National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He joined MediaTek, Inc., Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2003, where he develops integrated circuits related to multimedia coding standard and digital consumer devices. His research interests include video coding, video processing and VLSI design. Wei-Min Chao was born in Taoyuan, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1977. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronics Engineering, National Taiwan University in 2000 and 2002 separately. His research interests include video coding algorithms and VLSI architecture for image and video processing. Liang-Gee Chen was born in Yun-Lin, Taiwan, in 1956. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, in 1979, 1981, and 1986, respectively. He was an Instructor (1981–1986), and an Associate Professor (1986–1988) in the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University. In the military service during 1987 to 1988, he was an Associate Professor in the Institute of Resource Management, Defense Management College. In 1988, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University. During 1993 to 1994 he was a Visiting Consultant of DSP Research Department, AT&T Bell Lab, Murray Hill. In 1997, he was a visiting scholar of the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. During 2001 to 2004, he was the first director of the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering (GIEE) in National Taiwan University (NTU). Currently, he is a Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and GIEE in NTU, Taipei, Taiwan. He is also the director of the Electronics and Optoelectronics Research Laboratories in Industrial Technology Research Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His current research interests are DSP architecture design, video processor design, and video coding systems. Dr. Chen has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology since 1996, as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems since 1999, and as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II since 2000. He has been the Associate Editor of the Journal of Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing since 1999, and a Guest Editor for the Journal of Video Signal Processing Systems. He is also the Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE. He was the General Chairman of the 7th VLSI Design/CAD Symposium in 1995 and of the 1999 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems: Design and Implementation. He is the Past-Chair of Taipei Chapter of IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society, and is a member of the IEEE CAS Technical Committee of VLSI Systems and Applications, the Technical Committee of Visual Signal Processing and Communications, and the IEEE Signal Processing Technical Committee of Design and Implementation of SP Systems. He is the Chair-Elect of the IEEE CAS Technical Committee on Multimedia Systems and Applications. During 2001–2002, he served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society. He received the Best Paper Award from the R.O.C. Computer Society in 1990 and 1994. Annually from 1991 to 1999, he received Long-Term (Acer) Paper Awards. In 1992, he received the Best Paper Award of the 1992 Asia-Pacific Conference on circuits and systems in the VLSI design track. In 1993, he received the Annual Paper Award of the Chinese Engineer Society. In 1996 and 2000, he received the Outstanding Research Award from the National Science Council, and in 2000, the Dragon Excellence Award from Acer. He is a member of Phi Tan Phi.     

Dynamically anchored conferencing handoff for dual-mode cellular/WLAN handsets

In this paper we consider vertical handoff for enterprise-based dual-mode (DM) cellular/WLAN handsets. When the handset roams out of WLAN coverage, the DM's cellular interface is used to maintain the call by anchoring it through an enterprise PSTN gateway/PBX. Soft handoff can be achieved in this case if the gateway supports basic conference bridging, since a new leg of the call can be established to the conference bridge while the existing media stream path is active. Unfortunately this requires that all intra-enterprise calls be routed through the gateway when the call is established. In this paper we consider a SIP based architecture to perform conferenced dual-mode handoff and propose a much more scalable mechanism for short-delay environments, whereby active calls are handed off into the conference bridge prior to the initiation of the vertical handoff. Results are presented which are taken from a dual-mode handset testbed, from analytic models, and from simulations which characterize the scalability of the proposed mechanism. Mohammed Smadi received the B.Eng and Mgmt and M.A.Sc degrees in Computer Engineering from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Mohammed received an NSERC doctoral award in 2005 and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Wireless Networking Group at McMaster University. Terence D. Todd received the B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While at Waterloo he spent 3 years as a Research Associate with the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG). He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Professor Todd spent 1991 on research leave in the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He also spent 1998 on research leave at The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England. While at ORL he worked on the piconet project which was an early embedded wireless network testbed. Dr. Todd’s research interests include metropolitan/local area networks, wireless communications and the performance analysis of computer communication networks and systems. He is a past Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and currently holds the NSERC/RIM/CITO Chair on Pico-Cellular Wireless Internet Access Networks. Dr. Todd is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario and a member of the IEEE. Vytas Kezys was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1957. He received the B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University, Canada, in 1979. From 1979 to 1998, Mr. Kezys was involved in radar and communications research as Principal Research Engineer at the Communications Research Laboratory, McMaster University. While at McMaster, his research activities included array signal processing for low-angle tracking radar, radar signal processing, and smart antennas for wireless communications. Mr. Kezys was founder and President of TalariCom Inc., a start-up company that developed cost effective smart antenna technologies for broadband wireless access applications. Currently, Mr. Kezys is Director of Advanced Products at Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada. Vahid S. Azhari received his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, IUST and University of Tehran, Iran, in 2000 and 2003 respectively. His M.S. research focused on designing scheduling algorithms for switch fabrics. He also worked for two years for the Iranian Telecommunication Research Centre on developing software for SDH switches. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree at the Wireless Networking Laboratory, McMaster University, Canada. His main area of research includes handoff management in integrated wireless networks, WLAN deployment techniques, and wireless mesh networks. Dongmei Zhao received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in June 2002. Since July 2002 she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada where she is an assistant professor. Dr. Zhao’s research interests include modeling and performance analysis, quality-of-service provisioning, access control and admission control in wireless cellular networks and integrated cellular and ad hoc networks. Dr. Zhao is a member of the IEEE.     

Distributed power allocation and scheduling for parallel channel wireless networks

In this paper we develop distributed approaches for power allocation and scheduling in wireless access networks. We consider a model where users communicate over a set of parallel multi-access fading channels, as in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system. At each time, each user must decide which channels to transmit on and how to allocate its power over these channels. We give distributed power allocation and scheduling policies, where each user’s actions depend only on knowledge of their own channel gains. Assuming a collision model for each channel, we characterize an optimal policy which maximizes the system throughput and also give a simpler sub-optimal policy. Both policies are shown to have the optimal scaling behavior in several asymptotic regimes. Xiangping Qin received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University,China in 1998 and 2000 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2005. She is currently a senior engineer at Samsung Information Systems America. In 2005/2006, She was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. In 2004, she was an intern on the technical staff of Intel Cooperate Technology Laboratory, Oregon. Her primary research interests include wireless communication and data networks. She is the recipient of aWalter P. Murphy Fellowship for the 2000/2001 academic year from the ECE Department at Northwestern University. Randall A. Berry received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1993 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and 2000, respectively. In September 2000, he joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 1998 he was on the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced Networks Group, where he worked on optical network protocols. His current research interests include wireless communication, data networks and information theory. Dr. Berry is the recipient of a 2003 NSF CAREER award and the 2001-02 best teacher award from the ECE Department at Northwestern. He is currently serving on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and is a guest editor of an upcoming special issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on “Relaying and Cooperation in Networks.”     

A call admission and rate control scheme for multimedia support over IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

Quality of service (QoS) support for multimedia services in the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN is an important issue for such WLANs to become a viable wireless access to the Internet. In this paper, we endeavor to propose a practical scheme to achieve this goal without changing the channel access mechanism. To this end, a novel call admission and rate control (CARC) scheme is proposed. The key idea of this scheme is to regulate the arriving traffic of the WLAN such that the network can work at an optimal point. We first show that the channel busyness ratio is a good indicator of the network status in the sense that it is easy to obtain and can accurately and timely represent channel utilization. Then we propose two algorithms based on the channel busyness ratio. The call admission control algorithm is used to regulate the admission of real-time or streaming traffic and the rate control algorithm to control the transmission rate of best effort traffic. As a result, the real-time or streaming traffic is supported with statistical QoS guarantees and the best effort traffic can fully utilize the residual channel capacity left by the real-time and streaming traffic. In addition, the rate control algorithm itself provides a solution that could be used above the media access mechanism to approach the maximal theoretical channel utilization. A comprehensive simulation study in ns-2 has verified the performance of our proposed CARC scheme, showing that the original 802.11 DCF protocol can statically support strict QoS requirements, such as those required by voice over IP or streaming video, and at the same time, achieve a high channel utilization. Hongqiang Zhai received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in July 1999 and January 2002 respectively. He worked as a research intern in Bell Labs Research China from June 2001 to December 2001, and in Microsoft Research Asia from January 2002 to July 2002. Currently he is pursuing the PhD degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida. He is a student member of IEEE. Xiang Chen received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 2005. He is currently a Senior Research Engineer at Motorola Labs, Arlington Heights, IL. His research interests include resource management, medium access control, and quality of service (QoS) in wireless networks. He is a Member of Tau Beta Pi and a student member of IEEE. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D degree in Systems and Control Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994, and a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. From June 1997 to July 1998, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. From July 1998 to May 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In May 2000, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida where he got the early promotion with tenure in August 2003 and has been an Associate Professor since then. He has published over one hundred (100) papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He is currently serving as an Editor for many journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and ACM Wireless Networks. He is also actively participating in conference organization such as the Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Program Co-Chair for the Global Internet and Next Generation Networks Symposium in IEEE Globecom’2004 and the Program Vice Chair for 2000 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’2000).