Network Optimization and Control

The authors study how protocol design for various functionalities within communication network architecture can be viewed as a distributed resource allocation problem. This involves understanding what resources are, how to allocate them fairly, and perhaps most importantly, how to achieve this goal in a distributed and stable fashion. They start with ideas of a centralized optimization framework and show how congestion control, routing and scheduling in wired and wireless networks can be thought of as fair resource allocation. They then move to the study of controllers that allow a decentralized solution of this problem.