US-Egypt Cooperative Research: Untying the Gordian Knot: Practical and Distributed Optimal Scheduling to Support Multimedia Traffic over Wireless Networks

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This project supports a cooperative research effort by Dr. Eylem Ekici of Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, and Dr. Moustafa Youssef of the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Alexandria, Egypt. They plan to study "practical and distributed optimal scheduling to support multimedia traffic over wireless networks." Communications and networking have become inseparable components of modern life. With the ever-increasing penetration of mobile and networked devices, the majority of available services rely heavily on information obtained or delivered through a networked information infrastructure. This project will design distributed scheduling algorithms for wireless networks that will increase efficiency and "quality of experience", especially for streaming multimedia applications that demand significant bandwidth. The project is based on using available wireless resources but with more efficient information transfer algorithms to ensure existing wireless networks are used to their fullest extent. This research has clear benefits around the world as the use of mobile devices continues to expand, with specific benefits likely for real-time multimedia delivery activities such as video streaming, video conferencing and distributed surveillance. The project includes an explicit plan to incorporate the research work into educational programs for students at the participating universities, with signicant benefits likely. The education plan includes technology transfer, student training, outreach to high school students, and international collaboration. The US PI will leverage various established programs at his university to recruit qualified women and students from underrepresented groups for the research.Recently, two important properties have emerged as prominent features of current, and likely future, networking environments: First, multimedia traffic (e.g. multimedia podcasts, broadcasts, interactive real time communication applications) constitute an increasing fraction of the communication network load; second, there is a significant shift to connections that contain at least one hop delivered over wireless links that are shared by multiple users. The widespread use of multimedia services over wireless networks is causing stress on the available bandwidth and is affecting the quality of experience (QoE) for users, especially with streaming multimedia applications. Recent studies of the delay performance of throughput-optimal distributed schemes have generally revealed that their delay characteristics are unacceptable for serving multimedia traffic. This indicates a need for alternative distributed solutions geared towards the QoE metrics associated with multimedia traffic. This project will design distributed scheduling algorithms for wireless networks, and will implement the algorithms on real platforms and evaluate the effect of different practical issues on the performance of the algorithms. The research will be: (1) to add the ability to establish multiple optimization criteria on a per-flow (as opposed to an aggregate) basis, (2) to extend the algorithm to multiple hops in a topology, (3) to rectify tradeoffs in jitter and long-term fairness, (4) to account for finiteness and variability in flow lifetimes, and (5) to ensure practical implementation of the resulting decentralized algorithm. The objectives encompass a challenging research agenda, and the research is both incremental and high risk. The US PI will focus on design and theoretical analysis, and the Egyptian PI to focus on implementation and prototyping. This project is funded through the US-Egypt Joint Science and Technology Fund Program. Support for the U.S. side of these cooperative projects is provided to the National Science Foundation by the U.S. Department of State. The Egyptian Government provides support for the Egyptian side of the collaboration.