Section: New Results

Optimization of Networks and Communication

This section describes two independent contributions on the analysis and optimization of networks and communication.

• Telecommunication networks are converging to a massively distributed cloud infrastructure interconnected with software defined networks. In the envisioned architecture, services will be deployed flexibly and quickly as network slices. Our paper [26] addresses a major bottleneck in this context, namely the challenge of computing the best resource provisioning for network slices in a robust and efficient manner. With tractability in mind, we propose a novel optimization framework which allows fine-grained resource allocation for slices both in terms of network bandwidth and cloud processing. The slices can be further provisioned and auto-scaled optimally based on a large class of utility functions in real-time. Furthermore, by tuning a slice-specific parameter, system designers can trade off traffic-fairness with computing-fairness to provide a mixed fairness strategy. We also propose an iterative algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) that provably converges to the optimal resource allocation and we demonstrate the method's fast convergence in a wide range of quasi-stationary and dynamic settings.

• Distributed power control schemes in wireless networks have been well-examined, but standard methods rarely consider the effect of potentially random delays, which occur in almost every real-world network. We present in paper [33] Robust Feedback Averaging, a novel power control algorithm that is capable of operating in delay-ridden and noisy environments. We prove optimal convergence of this algorithm in the presence of random, time-varying delays, and present numerical simulations that indicate that Robust Feedback Averaging outperforms the ubiquitous Foschini-Miljanic algorithm in several regimes.