Medium Access Using Queues

Medium access control (MAC) resolves contention among simultaneously transmitting wireless nodes so as to utilize the wireless medium efficiently while mitigating interference.To be implementable, the MAC algorithm is required to be totally distributed and simple. In this talk, we will present such a MAC algorithm that is optimal in terms of utilizing medium and thus bringing a long pursued quest (since 1970s) to an end. In this MAC, each node utilizes its local queue-size and recent contention history to make decisions. We will also discuss related issues in stochastic networks. The talk will be self-contained. It is based on joint work with Jinwoo Shin and Prasad Tetali.

Speaker Details

Devavrat Shah is currently a Jamieson career development associate professor with the department of electrical engineering and computer science, MIT. He is a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and Operations Research Center (ORC).
His research focus is on theory of large complex networks which includes network algorithms, stochastic networks, network information theory and large scale statistical inference. He was awarded the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Award 2008 for his work on network scheduling algorithms.
He received the 2010 Erlang Prize from INFORMS which is given to a young researcher for outstanding contributions to applied probability.
He is currently an associate editor of Operations Research.