CISE Seminar: October 2, 2020 – Ness Shroff, The Ohio State University

Network Utility Maximization has been studied for resource allocation problems in communication networks for nearly two decades. Nonetheless, a major challenge that continues to remain open is how to develop a distributed congestion control and routing algorithm that can simultaneously provide utility optimality, fast convergence speed, and low delay. This has become an especially pressing issue considering the tremendous growth in large-scale data centers around the world and the need to design of hyper-scalable dynamic networks to keep up with the data demand and new user experiences. To address this challenge we take a fresh perspective on this old problem and develop a new algorithm that offers the fastest known convergence speed, vanishing utility optimality gap with finite queue length, and low routing complexity.Our key contributions in this work are: i) the design of a new joint congestion control and routing algorithm based on a type of inexact Uzawa method in the Alternating Directional Method of Multiplier; ii) a new theoretical path to prove global and linear convergence rate without requiring the full rank assumption of the constraint matrix; and iii) a clear path for implementing the proposed method in a fully distributed fashion.

Ness B. Shroff received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1994. He joined Purdue University immediately thereafter, becoming Full Professor of ECE and the director of a university-wide center on wireless systems and applications in 2004. In 2007, he joined The Ohio State University, where he holds the Ohio Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in networking and communications, in the departments of ECE and CSE. He holds or has held visiting (chaired) professor positions at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China, and IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India. He has received numerous best paper awards for his research and was listed in Thomson Reuters’ on The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds, and noted as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters in 2014 and 2015. He currently serves as the steering committee chair for ACM Mobihoc, and Editor in Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.  He received the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award for seminal contributions to scheduling and resource allocation in wireless networks.