Fall 2017 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
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Srinivas Shakkottai,
Texas A&M University
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Abstract
Current wireless edge networks with tightly coupled PHY/MAC that cater to worst or average case performance lack the agility to best serve legions of heterogeneous applications. Simultaneously, software reconfigurable infrastructure has become increasingly mainstream to the point that per-packet and per-flow decisions can be dynamically controlled at multiple layers of the communications stack.
In this talk, I will describe our efforts at the design of software defined platforms that allow for the implementation of heterogeneous per-packet mechanisms. Key components include antennas with reconfigurable radiation patterns, reconfigurable modulation and coding schemes, and reconfigurable queues for medium access control (MAC). We have two parallel thrusts in this direction. The first is on using legacy hardware and tapping into existing reconfigurability mechanisms available on off-the-shelf wireless access points. The second is on developing a clean-slate programmable PHY/MAC platform on which desired mechanisms that can provide services such as ultra-low latencies (< 5 ms) can be configured as needed.
Tying together these layers, I will describe a market-based platform, FlowBazaar that allows us to measure Quality of Service (QoS) statistics on the wireless edge, to determine the mapping between these statistics and the resultant impact on perceived application performance measured by Quality of Experience (QoE), and to complete the chain by eliciting the end-user to declare the value of obtaining such QoEs using small-scale auctions. We thus enable an ecosystem wherein disparate applications are able to obtain the necessary resources for optimal performance.
Biosketch
Srinivas Shakkottai received a PhD (2007) in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a post-doctoral scholar in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University in 2007, and is currently an associate professor at the Dept. of ECE at Texas A&M University. His research interests include content distribution systems, economics of network resource allocation, game theory, wireless networks, and Internet data analytics. Srinivas is the recipient of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Young Investigator Award (2009) and the NSF Career Award (2012), as well as faculty research awards from Cisco (2008) and Google (2010). He also received The Dept. of ECE Outstanding Professor Award (2013) and was selected as a TEES (College of Engineering) Select Young Faculty Fellow (2014) at Texas A&M University.