Wireless connectivity with mobility support becomes an important enabling technology in future computing infrastructure. Especially, IP-based mobile networks (including cellular networks), mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and wireless sensor networks attract a lot of attention recently due to their vast applications, the inexpensive wireless LAN solutions such as IEEE 802.11, HIPERLAN and Bluetooth technologies, and most of them do not need communication infrastructure in their basic forms and utilize unlicensed ISM band.
Research Goals
Our goal in the Wireless Networks Research Laboratory (WINET) is to investigate energy efficiency awareness,
spectral efficiency, incentive issues (such as pricing and fairness), and interoperability issues, especially in the convergence
networks, in wireless networks.
Power reduction techniques in wireless networks have been an important research area in WINET. We specifically concentrate on
the algorithmic and graph theoretical study of designing energy efficient protocols (such as routing, and topology control).
By utilizing the fact that the wireless networks inherently have some geometry properties (e.g., a device can only communicate
with another device within certain distance range), we proposed a sequence of theoretically proven, communication
efficient distributed methods (or time-efficient centralized methods) for routing, topology control, and channel assignment.
We also spend lots of effort on studying the economic issues in wireless networks, and generally, so-called
no-cooperative computing with selfish agents. Traditionally, when we design network protocols, it is explicitly or
implicitly assumed that the participant agents will follow the prescribed protocols without any deviation.
However, this is not the case in most applications when the devices are owned by individual users or organizations.
It is well-known that many traditionally designed protocols will not work in this new setting (it is so-called
price of anarchy). We then need to study what will these traditionally designed protocols perform, and to design
new protocols if traditional protocols do not perform well.
Research Keywords
Wireless networks, Energy, Topology Control, Incentives, Pricing, Protocol.
Some group members of our research group (from left to right):
Mihai, WeiZhao, Kousha, Xiang-Yang
Copyright @ IIT Wireless Network Research Group, 2005