Mung Chiang, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Steven H. Low, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology
A. Robert Calderbank, Professor, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, Princeton University
Layered network architecture has traditionally been designed based on engineering heuristics. Recently a mathematically rigorous, practically relevant, and unifying framework has emerged to view the network as a solver of a generalized utility maximization problem, with each decomposed subproblem corresponding to a different layer, and functions of variables coordinating the subproblems as the interfaces among the layers. Such decompositions can be carried out both horizontally across geographically disparate network elements and vertically into various functional modules. Alternative decompositions can be explored to search for the most appropriate modularized and distributed design. This framework of “Layering As Optimization Decomposition” builds on the success of reverse engineering network protocols as mathematical programming problems and further leads to an analytic foundation for functionality allocation and quantification of network architectural principles.
This tutorial surveys the recent advances in establishing this framework as a systematic approach to analyze and design protocol stacks in a holistic way that reveals the underlying structures and explores network design alternatives. Recent results from many research groups will be coherently summarized in the tutorial. Real-world applications to Internet and broadband access communications will also be highlighted. Particular emphasis will be put on the implications of innovations in the physical layer, such as adaptive coding, MIMO signal processing, and power control, on end-user utility.
M. Chiang is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering and mathematics, and M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, all from Stanford University. Dr. Chiang conducts research in the areas of nonlinear optimization of communication systems, broadband access networks, and information theory. He has been awarded as a Hertz Foundation Fellow and received Stanford University School of Engineering Terman Award, SBC Communications New Technology Introduction Contribution Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and Princeton University Howard B. Wentz Junior Faculty Award. Dr. Chiang is the Lead Guest Editor of the Special Issue of IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications on “Nonlinear Optimization of Communication Systems”, a Guest Editor of the Joint Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on “Networking and Information Theory”, and the Program Co-Chair of the 38th Conference on Information Sciences and Systems.
Steven H. Low received his B.S. from Cornell University, and MS and PhD from Berkeley, all in electrical engineering. He is an Associate Professor at Caltech, where he leads the FAST Project, and a Senior Fellow of the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, from 1992 to 1996 and with the University of Melbourne from 1996 to 2000. Dr. Low was a co-recipient of the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award in 1997 and the 1996 R&D 100 Award. He is on the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, ACM Computing Surveys, Computer Networks Journal, NOW Foundations and Trends in Networking, and is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. His research interests are in the control and optimization of networks and protocols.
A. Robert Calderbank is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at Princeton University where he directs the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He joined Princeton from AT&T where he was Vice President for Research and responsible for designing the first Research Lab in the world where the primary focus is data. Inventions by Dr. Calderbank in his career at Bell Labs and AT&T have transformed communications practice in voiceband modems, advanced read channels for magnetic recording, and wireless systems. He also created the framework for quantum error correction together with Peter Shor and colleagues at AT&T Labs. Dr. Calderbank was honored by the IEEE Information Theory Prize Paper Award in 1995 for his work on the Z4 linearity of Kerdock and Preparata Codes (joint with A.R. Hammons Jr., P.V. Kumar, N.J.A. Sloane, and P. Sole), and again in 1999 for the invention of space-time codes (joint with V.Tarokh and N. Seshadri). He became an AT&T Fellow in 2000, received the IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.