CAREER: Etiquette for Collaborative Communication and Networking

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CAREER: Etiquette for Collaborative Communications and NetworkingNSF 0643954, PI: Daniela TuninettiAbstractWireless networks have traditionally been deployed with interference avoidance as the primary objective to ensure high throughput. Recently, a new and exciting paradigm has emerged in which interfering communications from different users are viewed as a way to spread "common information" across the network, thereby allowing for cooperation among otherwise uncoordinated transmitters. Cooperative communications holds the potential to enhance the communication capabilities of all users in the network simultaneously if users share their resources with their neighbors. This research aims at establish a theoretical foundation for collaborative communications by identifying the optimal resource sharing conduct, here referred to as etiquette, among users in peer-to-peer wireless networks. It is centered on the interference channel with generalized feedback, a novel information-theoretic network model that incorporates the knowledge a communicating pair of users can infer about other concurrent communications from information overheard. This research has two main thrusts: (1) developing innovative coding and signaling techniques for resource sharing to improve capacity, and investigate the associated scaling laws, (2) designing efficient and distributed multi-access and routing protocols to realize the benefits of collaborative communications with minimal overhead. The goal is to shed light on a richer and more powerful class of cooperation modes than currently proposed multi-hop relaying, and to lay the foundations for a deeper understanding of the ultimate tradeoffs involved in peer-to-peer networking. The technical approach includes comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive computer simulations on real network data. In addition, a new multidisciplinary course that bridges Information Theory and Networking Theory is developed to expose students to the benefits of cross-fertilizations of the two disciplines to the design of collaborative communication networks.