Overhead-Performance Tradeoffs in Distributed Wireless Networks.

摘要

This project studied the tradeoff between the performance of resource and link controllers in distributed wireless networks and the amount of overhead measurement and control information utilized by the controllers. The key novel idea guiding the research was to view the control signals as messages in a distributed lossy source code, and the overhead performance tradeoff as a rate distortion curve. The project began by motivating the importance of the problem by authoring a thorough review of resource control signaling in the 4G cellular standards, which observed that roughly a quarter to a third of all downlink time-frequency resources are spent on non-information bearing control information that is not efficiently encoded. Three simple resource controllers were then investigated, and their overhead performance rate distortion function was calculated using a novel adaptation of the Blahut Arimoto algorithm to the CEO problem with independent sources. Practical source compressors and quantizers for both interactive and non-interactive control scenarios were developed that approached the associated fundamental limits. Extensions to controllers for multiuser MIMO communications and joint source channel codes for the control information were also considered.