Cross-layer design of wireless ad-hoc networks

Wireless ad-hoc networks will support many new and exciting applications such as entertainment networks, sensor networks, smart homes and buildings, and automated highways and factories. These systems will hve enormous variation in their device capabilities, network requirements, and application demands, giving rise to significant wireless network design challenges. These challenges are best addressed using a cross-layer design of the network protocol stack. In this talk we give an overview of our work on cross-layer design for wireless ad-hoc networks. We will first discuss fundamental capacity limits of these networks along with the link, MAC, and routing protocols that achieve these limits. These fundamental limits indicate significant performance benefts from a cross-layer design of these protocols. Building on this insight, we will next describe our work on cross-layer protocol designs for three specific applications for wireless ad-hoc networks: video transmission, distributed control, and energy-constrained sensor networks. Performance results for each application will be presented that demonstrate significant performance improvements through cross-layer designs.
Andrea Goldsmith received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from U.C. Berkeley in 1986, 1991, and 1994, respectively. From 1986-1990 she was affiliated with Maxim Technologies, where she worked on packet radio and satellite communication systems, and from 1991-1992 she was affiliated with AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she worked on propagation models and channel estimation for cellular systems. She was an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology from 1994-1998, and then joined the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford University where she is now an associate professor. Her research includes work in the capacity of wireless channels and networks, wireless communication and information theory, adaptive resource allocation in wireless networks, multiantenna wireless systems, energy-constrained wireless communications, wireless communications for distributed control, and cross-layer design for cellular systems, ad-hoc wireless networks, and sensor networks.

Dr. Goldsmith holds the Bredt Faculty Development Scholar Chair at Stanford and is a recipient of the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lectureship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the National Science Foundation CAREER Development Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the National Semiconductor Faculty Development Award, the Okawa Foundation Award, and the David Griep Memorial Prize from U.C. Berkeley. She was an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 1995 to 2002 and has been an editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine since 1995. She is also an elected member of Stanford's Faculty Senate and the Board of Governers for the IEEE Information Theory Society.