The cellular telephone success story prompts the wireless communications community to turn its attention to other information services, many of them in the category of "wireless data" communications. One lesson of cellular telephone network operation is that effective radio resource management (power control, channel assignment, and handoffs) is essential to promote system quality and efficiency. Radio resource management will be equally, if not more, critical in third and future generation wireless systems that include high speed data applications.

This talk will present a new framework for power control in wireless data networks. The approach proposed here relies on using microeconomic theories that take into account notions of utility and pricing. It is shown that this new approach to power control for wireless data performs better than traditional techniques applied for voice signals. In particular, mobile radio power (and rate control) algorithms are formulated as noncooperative games, where individual users adjust their transmitter powers and rates in order to maximize their utility. It is then shown that system wide increases in utility can be achieved by introducing pricing in these games, which is essentially a mechanism that attempts to police the resource allocations of each user.

Narayan Mandayam received the B.Tech (Hons.) degree in 1989 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1991 and 1994 from Rice University, all in electrical engineering. Since 1994, he has been at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Rutgers University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

His research interests are in wireless system modeling and performance, multiaccess protocols, software defined radios for interference cancellation, and radio resource management for wireless data networks. Narayan is a recipient of the Institute Silver Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He was selected by the National Academy of Engineering in 1999 to participate in the Annual Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering.