Visitor's Talk



An Externality-based Decentralized Optimal Power Allocation Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

• Speaker: Shrutivandana Sharma, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science-Systems at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

• Abstract:
  The rapidly growing demand for wireless communication makes efficient power allocation a critical factor in the network's efficient operation. Power allocation in decentralized wireless systems, where the transmission of a user creates interference to other users and directly affects their utilities, has been recently studied by pricing methods. However, pricing methods do not result in efficient/optimal power allocations for such systems for the following reason. Systems where a user's actions directly affect the utilities of other users are known to have externalities. It is well known that in systems with externalities, standard efficiency theorems on market equilibrium do not apply and pricing methods do not result in Pareto optimal outcomes.
  In our work we formulate the power allocation problem for a wireless mesh network as a decentralized allocation problem with `externalities'. We consider a decentralized system where users' utilities and channel gains are private information and the system has multiple interference temperature constraints to control interference. For this system we present a decentralized mechanism to allocate transmission powers to the users. The mechanism takes into account the externality generated to the other users by the transmission of each user, satisfies the informational constraints of the system, overcomes the inefficiency of pricing mechanisms and guarantees convergence to globally optimal power allocations. The mechanism also works for hierarchical networks.

• Biographical Sketch:
  Shrutivandana Sharma is a graduate student in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science-Systems at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received Bachelor of Technology in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 2004. Since joining University of Michigan, she has been working with Prof. Demosthenis Teneketzis in the Systems division. Her research is focused on designing resource allocation mechanisms for communication networks using models from Mathematical Economics.