NEDG: A Universal Approach to Channel-Adaptive Resource Allocation and Scheduling for Wireless OFDM Networks

为多跳无线网络中的每个节点提供一个或多个多信道无线电为改善网络性能提供了一条很有前途的途径。近年来，多个信道和无线电对网络吞吐量的影响得到了广泛的研究。但人们对它们对通信延迟的影响知之甚少，通信延迟是应急响应和灾难恢复等一大类时间关键型应用程序的重要性能指标。虽然毫无疑问，多个通道和无线电具有减少通信延迟的潜力，但真正重要的是特定的算法可以实现多少好处。这项研究对利用多个信道和无线电来最小化通信延迟进行了全面的算法研究。本研究提出的算法可以直接应用于多跳无线网络中的实时应用。多跳无线网络的性能与信道数目和/或无线电数目之间的关系的理论分析也可以指导业界进行高性价比的多跳无线网络的设计。为这四项任务中的每一项寻求最短通信时间表的问题是NP困难的。研究人员为它们开发了恒定近似算法，并分析了信道数量和无线电数量对构建的通信调度的延迟的影响。这项研究引起了许多研究团体的兴趣，并可能成为未来多信道、多无线电、多跳无线网络有趣项目的基础。本研究将学生培养与课程开发相结合。

Providing each node in a multihop wireless network with one or more multi-channel radios offers a promising avenue for improving the networking performance. Recently, the impact of multiple channels and radios on network throughput has been extensively studied. But little is known about their impact on communication latency, which is an important performance metric for a broad class of time-critical applications such as emergency response and disaster recovery. While it is of no doubt that multiple channels and radios hold potentials of reducing the communication latency, what really matters is how much benefit can be realized by specific algorithms. This research conducts comprehensive algorithmic studies of minimizing the communication latency by utilizing multiple channels and radios. The algorithms developed in this research can be applied directly to support real-time applications in multihop wireless networks. The theoretical analysis of the performance against the number of channels and/or the number of radios can also provide guidance to industries on cost-effective design of multihop wireless networks.This research focuses on the communication schedules for four primitive communication tasks which are involved in almost allapplications: broadcasting, aggregation, gathering, and beaconing. The problem of seeking a shortest communication schedule for each of these four tasks is NP-hard. The investigators develop constant-approximation algorithms for them and analyze the impact of the number of channels and the number of radios on the latencies of the constructed communication schedules. This research is of interest to a number of research communities, and may serve as a basis for interesting future projects on multi-channel multi-radio multihop wireless networks. Both student training and curriculum development are integrated into this research.