NeTS-Medium: Collaborative Research: Unifying Network Coding and Cross-Layer Optimization for Wireless Mesh Networks: From Theory to Distributed Algorithms to Implementation

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。无线网状网络承诺为家庭带来高带宽低延迟应用提供灵活且经济高效的解决方案。网络编码和跨层优化是设计高性能网状网络的两种正交但极具吸引力的方法。前者通过巧妙的信息处理将干扰无线媒体作为广播信道，而后者则在各层之间智能地分配和共享网络资源。该项目研究了网络编码和跨层优化的长期期待和极具挑战性的协同联盟。会话间网络编码（INC）的特点，编码不同的网络流，是NP-难的。 尽管如此，在重要的实际情况下，这个问题还是可以处理的。基于新的路径为基础的特征，该项目严格量化的网络容量存在不同的实际INC计划。一种新的网络编码为基础的跨层范式的开发控制网格网络，考虑到实际的考虑，如鲁棒性，可扩展性，和随时间变化的无线广播环境。新的分布式，低开销的协议构建和验证的网格测试平台上的普渡大学校园。该项目积极招募本科生和代表性不足的学生。研究成果通过网络以及会议和期刊上的出版物传播。该项目的结果，从理论探索到实际测试平台上的协议部署，导致实现网状网络的全部功能所需的显着性能增益，这反过来又有可能彻底改变电信行业。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Wireless mesh networks promise a flexible and cost-effective solution for bringing high-bandwidth low-latency applications to the home. Two orthogonal but immensely attractive approaches for designing high-performance mesh networks are network coding and cross-layer optimization. The former exploits the interfering wireless media as a broadcast channel by ingenious information processing, while the latter intelligently allocates and shares network resources across the layers. This project investigates the long-overdue and highly challenging synergistic union of network coding and cross-layer optimization. The characterization of intersession network coding (INC), coding across different network flows, is NP-hard. Nonetheless, the problem can be made tractable under important practical settings. Based on new path-based characterizations, this project rigorously quantifies the network capacity in presence of different practical INC schemes. A new network-coding based cross-layer paradigm is developed for controlling mesh networks that takes into account practical considerations such as robustness, scalability, and time-varying wireless broadcast environment. New distributed, low-overhead protocols are constructed and validated over a mesh testbed on the Purdue University campus. Undergraduates and under-represented students are actively recruited for the project. Research results are disseminated via the web and through publications in conferences and journals. The results of the project, spanning from theoretic exploration to protocol deployment on a practical testbed lead to the significant performance gains necessary to realize the full capability of mesh networks, which in turn has the potential to revolutionize the telecommunications industry.