Some Wireless Networking Problems with a Theoretical Conscience

Abstract

Much of the current work on wireless networks focuses either on problems with (commercial or military) application urgency, such as cellular or ad-hoc networks, or on problems that concentrate on the physical layer, such as multiuser detection or fading channels. In this article, we examine a sampling of problems with a different character. They are pure network-layer problems in that they do not consider signal structures or formats but, rather, consider the signals as “black-box” packets, without regard to their internal structure. But they are also simplified and abstract versions of very complex real-world implementations that, hopefully, capture some of the essential conceptual aspects of wireless networking. Hence, as the title suggests, these problems have a theoretical “conscience.” They are motivated either by recent attempts to exploit ways of increasing the “capacity” of multiple access channels or by, also recent, attempts to exploit the “covert” characteristics of the wireless medium.