WNCG Authors Invited to Appear in IEEE Communications Magazine

Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Ted Rappaport were invited to submit an paper on their latest research to the IEEE Communications Magazine in October of 2003. The paper was titled "Cross-layer design for Wireless Networks".

As the cellular and PCS world collides with Wireless LANs and Internet-based packet data, new networking approaches will support the integration of voice and data on the composite infrastructure of cellular base stations and Ethernet-based wireless access points. The paper highlights some of the past accomplishments and promising research avenues for an important topic in the creation of future wireless networks. In this paper, the authors address the issue of cross-layer networking, where the physical and MAC layer knowledge of the wireless medium is shared with higher layers, in order to provide efficient methods of allocating network resources and applications over the Internet. In essence, future networks will need to provide "impedance matching" of the instantaneous radio channel conditions and capacity needs with the traffic and congestion conditions found over the packet-based world of the Internet. Further, such matching will need to be coordinated with a wide range of particular applications and user expectations, making the topic of cross-layer networking an increasingly important one for the evolving wireless build-out.