Abstract:
Due to the advantage of low-cost, high bandwidth, scalability and ease of deployment, wireless mesh network (WMN) is becoming a new paradigm of wireless network research and development. Compared to the traditional cellular network, WMN has a number of new research challenges toward making this new networking system successful. In particular, cross-layer design which simultaneously optimizes the control across multiple layers of the network has received increasing considerations for improving the performance of WMNs. In this talk, I will present two schemes that target at using cross layer design to leverage the emerging technology called network coding to improve system performance. The first scheme is about exploiting the physical layer rate adaptation capability to improve the performance of network coding in WMN. Based on channel condition, a new concept of relay-aided network coding was proposed to opportunistically exploit high transmission rates to increase the performance gain from network coding. The second scheme focuses on the cross-layer design of the routing protocol at the network layer and the scheduling algorithm at the MAC layer with the consideration of network coding. The design problem is decomposed into two sub-problems: one is the adaptive routing problem and the other is the network coding aware scheduling problem. Distributed algorithms are proposed to solve these sub-problems and simultaneously improve the overall networking performance of WMNs.

Biography:
Dr. Hao Zhu received his Ph.D in Computer Sciences and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2004. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor at Florida International University. His research areas include resource management and its optimization in cellular and multi-hop wireless networks.