Flow Control in Wireless Networks

Flow control, including congestion control for data and rate control for multimedia, is an important issue for information transmission in wireless networks.

In this talk, we proposed a solution for flow control in wireless networks. It can be modeled as a nonlinear singularly perturbed system and interpreted as dynamically adjusting both flow rates and number of connections of users. This modeling enable us to solve the problem without changing today’s network infrastructure or transport protocol, which different the work from all existing approaches. We explore the uniqueness of equilibrium rate and its exponential stability, implying the optimality and scalability of the solution. The analysis also indicates the feasibility of incremental deployment and applicability to wired networks. Further, it turns out the work also implies a two timescale framework for other flow control problem without touching underlying infrastructure or protocols.

Following the insights, we design practical end-to-end schemes addressing flow control in wireless problem in practice. Their performances are evaluated and characterized using both NS-2 simulations and actual experiments over Verizon Wireless 1xRTT commercial data network. This work results in a US patent.

Speaker Details

Minghua Chen received a B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, and is expecting a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from University of California at Berkeley, in 1999, 2001 and 2006 respectively. He received a Pao Family fellowship in 2001, a Management of Technology in China Fellowship in 2004, all from U.C. Berkeley. He is also a receipt of Outstanding Oversea Student Scholarship from Education Department of China, in 2005. His work on rate control for video over wireless won a runner-up for the Best Paper Award of IEEE WirelessCom 2005 (top 3 out of 250+ accepted papers). He is co-author of the book IPv6 Principle and Practice (People’s Posts and Telecommunication Publishing House, 2000). His research interests are in general area of information transmission over wired/wireless networks, including source coding and processing, streaming optimization, flow control, p2p and multipath transmission, and wireless communications.

Date:
Speakers:
Minghua Chen
Affiliation:
University of California at Berkeley

    • Portrait of Minghua Chen

      Minghua Chen

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running