The requirement for higher data throughput as well as the number of mobile devices have been steadily increasing in the last few years. Since the available frequency spectrum is limited, future communication systems are expected to make a more efficient use of the available spectrum. Resource allocation is an important problem in wireless communication systems which becomes quite crucial in 5G technology, since pico-cells, femto-cells and macro-cells are overlapping in many scenarios making the resources one of the main bottlenecks of the network. While such problems have been targeted by pure communications approaches, they have been unsuccessful in deriving stability and/or performance certificates and the results obtained rely on heuristics whose performance cannot be predicted or justified. We carry systematic research via an interdisciplinary approach between control, communications and signal processing to:
- develop resource allocation mechanisms that operate in a distributed fashion, guaranteeing stability of the overall system;
- establish robustness to the network impairments (changing environment, delays, etc);
- ensure scalability of the proposed resource allocation mechanisms (the Internet would be useless if no scalability could be guaranteed, requiring restarting/resetting the network every time a new device was connected to it).