CAREER: Cross-Layer Integrated Protocol Design for Broadband Wireless Data Networks: A Microeconomic Approach

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The use of wireless technology has the potential to significantly reduce the cost and enhance the growth of broadband data access, which is currently dominated by the cost of installation and maintenance of wired networks. A significant challenge in wireless networks is the issue of cross-layer design, which this research addresses by modeling broadband wireless networks as a complex system of interacting economies with two parts, wireless bandwidth (local), and the network core link-capacities (end-to-end). Media access control (MAC) provides a bandwidth multiplexing scheme, while at the transport layer, congestion/rate control determine the demand, hence the buffer and capacity allocation. In other words, the optimal design of broadband wireless networks can be viewed as the problem of scalable yet optimal utilization/sharing of various resources among autonomous users. Economists have been studying similar problems in various contexts such as air pollution, traffic management, etc. It is known, for example, that in all of these scenarios a centralization of decisions is not always possible or desirable. At the same time, unregulated access can result in over-utilization (which is suboptimal) due to each user's incentive to deviate from the common good (known as "tragedy of the commons"). Similarly, addressing the fundamental trade-offs between fairness, optimal allocation, and decentralization is essential in a cross-layer design of broadband wireless networks. This research provides a novel methodology that addresses such issues across various layers of protocol stack, and integrates these interdisciplinary studies into the academic curriculum.