Wireless communication protocols and resource optimization for distributed control of power networks

Ever increasing demands to achieve better performance of wireless networks have led the researchers to think beyond the conventional layered architecture of the protocol stack. Recent research activity across the diverse domain of wireless networks has revealed that high performance as well as robustness is achievable in its essence by cross-layer design and as a first step in this direction we have developed an optimal resource utilization framework with performance constraints. This framework analyzes the impact of end-to-end delay thresholds on the maximum throughput of a wireless network when used to achieve the objectives of the application layer. The convergence performance of throughput maximization framework is studied by implementing the distributed algorithm using a hardware test-bed. It is observed that the optimal tradeoff between the processing time and the associated communication overhead for distributed realization of resource utilization framework leads to an improved algorithm convergence performance.;The proposed framework is then extended to the network utility maximization problem with dual objective of maintaining a balance between the performance and robustness. To achieve this optimal tradeoff, delay robustness objective function is chosen by performing the sensitivity analysis. The distributed implementation of optimal throughput-robustness tradeoff problem is proposed using dual decomposition. For maximizing the network throughput an effective link transmission rate based power control problem is solved. Our results show that a small compromise in the network throughput leads to large delay robustness depending on the operating point. The framework also provides an insight about the network scaling and suggests a modular hierarchical architecture.