News & Event​

(Jun 25) Foundations of Context-Aware, Self-Organizing Wireless Small Cell Networks

Subject

Foundations of Context-Aware, Self-Organizing Wireless Small Cell Networks

Date

16:00, Thursday, June 25, 2015

Speaker

Walid Saad (Assistant Professor at the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech.)

Place

Room 110, N1

Overview:

Delivering high-quality, bandwidth-intensive wireless services anytime and anywhere requires disruptive changes to the architecture and operation of today’s wireless systems. Promising examples of such changes include: a) viral deployment of low-power, low-cost small cell base stations, b) direct device-to-device communications over the cellular and WiFi bands, and c) smart, proactive caching at different levels of the wireless system. Owing to this prospective evolution, the once-carefully planned networks will become an increasingly heterogeneous, unplanned mix of different types of devices, infrastructure nodes, technologies, and spectrum bands. Efficiently managing the scarce network resources in such a diverse and dynamic environment mandates a paradigm shift from centralized, user-agnostic approaches toward self-organizing, user-aware solutions. In this talk, we will introduce a novel framework for self-organizing resource management in next-generation wireless systems that will expedite this transformation. The proposed framework allows to reap the benefits of emerging wireless technologies by increasing the network’s intelligence and by exploring a dimension that has often been overlooked – the user’s context. We will discuss the various components of this framework while highlighting its promising outlook for boosting the wireless network’s performance. Then, we will study, in detail, the self-organizing perspective by exploring the use of matching theory – a Nobel prize-winning framework from economics and game theory – for the analysis of an illustrative resource management social network-aware scenario in wireless small cell networks. We then shed light on future works and opportunities in this and other related research areas. We conclude the talk by discussing other ongoing research activities in our group.

Profile:

Walid Saad received his B.E. degree in Computer and Communications Engineering from the Lebanese University, in 2004, his M.E. in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2007, and his Ph.D degree from the University of Oslo in 2010. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he leads the Network Science, Wireless, and Security (NetSciWiS) laboratory, within the Wireless@VT research group. His research interests include wireless and small cell networks, game theory, cybersecurity, smart grid, network science, cognitive radio, and self-organizing networks. Dr. Saad is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2013 and of the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 2015. He was the author/co-author of three conference best paper awards at WiOpt in 2009, ICIMP in 2010, and IEEE WCNC in 2012. He has also received the 2015 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society