CAREER: Power efficient design of wireless networks with delay guarantees

Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX

Investigators

Abstract

The growth of mobile devices has been phenomenal in the last few years. Despite the recent improvements in battery technologies, future applications and data rate requirements will drive mobile devices to be power hungry and put a severe strain on the scarce battery resource. In contrast to advances in the semiconductor industry, which follows Moore's Law, battery technology has advanced at a much slower pace. With the growing advent of high data rate mobile multimedia applications, color LCD displays, GPS and faster processors, the demand on battery energy becomes more intense. Thus, power efficiency is a critical requirement of future mobile devices. This research involves the study and design of power efficient wireless networks with Quality of service guarantees. Specific focus is on design of physical layer coding, modulation and power control in conjunction with MAC layer scheduling algorithms. The investigators study a unified framework for multiuser and multihop networks. Fundamental bounds on power required in mobile networks are derived to provide finite delay guarantees on the multimedia traffic. The investigators use a cross disciplinary approach incorporating ideas from traditional communications theory, queuing theory, signal processing and network design.