The increasing demand for higher data rates in cellular network results in increasing network density. As a consequence, inter-cell interference is becoming the most serious obstacle towards spectral efficiency. Therefore, considering that radio resources are limited and expensive, new techniques are required for efficient radio resource allocation in next generation cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a pure frequency reuse 1 scheme based on base station scheduling rather than the commonly adopted user scheduling. In particular, we formulate a base station scheduling problem to determine which base stations can be scheduled to simultaneously transmit, without causing excessive interference to any user of any of the scheduled base stations. We show that finding the optimal base station scheduling is NP-hard, and formulate the BASICS (BAse Station Inter-Cell Scheduling) algorithm, a novel heuristic to approximate the optimal solution at low complexity cost. The proposed algorithm is in line with the ABSF (almost blank sub-frame) technique recently standardized at the 3GPP. By means of numerical and packet-level simulations, we prove the effectiveness and superiority of BASICS as compared to the state of the art of inter-cell interference mitigation schemes.

The placement of regenerators in optical networks has become an active area of research during the last years. Given a set of lightpaths in a network G and a positive integer d, regenerators must be placed in such a way that in any lightpath there are no more than d hops without meeting a regenerator. In the talk I present a few optimization problems that arise within this framework. This is done by considering two cases: a. The cost function is the total number of regenerators placed at the nodes

Auctions have regained interest from researchers due to its different new applications (Google AdWords auctions, cloud computing auctions, privacy auctions, and white spaces spectrum auctions). In this work in particular we explore auctions for spectrum that can be allocated either to a single bidder (for licensed use) or to a collection of bidders (for unlicensed use).

While a considerable amount of research has been devoted to peer-to-peer backup and storage, no such system actually became widely adopted in the wild. My take on this is that there is the opportunity to build better, and possibly more successful, systems: while some design issues (e.g., erasure coding and data indexing) have been well explored, others have been barely scratched.

The media access control (MAC) layer of the IEEE 802.11 standard specifies a set of parameters that regulate the behavior of the wireless stations when accessing the channel. Although the standard defines a set of recommended values for these parameters, they are statically set and do not take into account the current conditions in the wireless local area network (WLAN) in terms of, e.g., number of contending stations and the traffic they generate, which results in suboptimal performance

Mobile devices are energy-limited. Both industry and the research community proposed solutions to overcome these limitations with relative success at different levels such as hardware, operating system and even applications.

Autonomous, self-configuring multihop networks present a versatile solution to provide broadband services with infrastructure-less deployments and decentralized management. Furthermore, their intrinsic adaptability and resilience can be enhanced with cognitive radio technology, enabling the nodes of the network to adjust their transmitting parameters to the specific operational environment.

METFAC-2.1 is a software tool for stochastic modeling using Markov reward models, i.e. continuous-time Markov chains with a reward rate structure on their state space. The tool has been developed under the direction of Prof. Juan A. Carrasco and offers many state-of-the-art numerical methods as well as simulation methods.

The talk will cover recent results on cooperative communication schemes for ad hoc and sensor networks. We will first discuss the offline computation of optimal policies for multi-hop virtual MISO transmission for distributed ad hoc networks in the presence of channel impairments such as path loss and multipath fading. Thus, we will elaborate on heuristic and opportunistic routing policies, by comparing their performance to that of optimal routing.

On Sep 26th and 27th we organize a meeting of the EU project TREND. The research conducted in this project is in the field of energy efficient networking. The second day of the project is dedicated to several research talks by members of the project as well as some external speakers. Those interested in attending to these sessions are welcome to do so. The only requirement is to complete the registration form by Thursday, September 22nd