CAREER: Towards a Formal Theory of Wireless Networking

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The last decades of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of networks that have become ever more pervasive and important. At the start of the 21st century developing a scientific understanding of networks remains an unresolved intellectual endeavor. Part of this effort is the understanding of wireless communication networks on a fundamental level pursued in this project. The research formulates optimization problems that model wireless networks in a variety of settings and translates properties of the former into characteristics of the latter. For doing so, the investigators rely on the fact that randomness, in the form of fading, yields seemingly more complex problems that nonetheless have a more tractable structure. This richer structure is studied to: (i) Determine architectural properties of wireless networks. (ii) Design algorithms to find optimal operating points for different types of physical layers. (iii) Develop strategies to learn fading distributions. (iv) Consider tradeoffs associated with acquisition of channel state information.The education agenda revolves around the excitement, challenge and discipline gaps. The excitement gap is about the excitement people feels about science and technology versus the lack of interest to pursue careers in science and technology. The challenge gap refers to the ongoing trend to reduce the complexity of material covered in courses. The discipline gap alludes to the compartmental experience offered to students and the reality of an increasingly hazy separation between disciplines. The education plan contributes to the closing of these gaps through the development of an undergraduate level course on stochastic processes and a graduate level course on optimal design of wireless networks. Both of these courses are designed to be challenging, exciting and multidisciplinary.