Robust optimization and machine learning tools for adaptive transmission in wireless networks

Current and emerging wireless systems require adaptive transmissions to improve their throughput, to meet the QoS requirements or to maintain robust performance. However finding the optimal transmit parameters is getting more difficult due to the growing number of wireless devices that share the wireless medium and the increasing dimensions of transmit parameters, e.g., frequency, time and spatial domain. The performance of adaptive transmission policies derived from given measurements degrade when the environment changes. The policies need to either build up protection against those changes or tune themselves accordingly. Also, an adaptation for systems that take advantages of transmit diversity with finer granularity of resource allocation is hard to come up with due to the prohibitively large number of explicit and implicit environmental variables to take into account. The solutions to the simplified problems often fail due to incorrect assumptions and approximations. In this dissertation, we suggest two tools for adaptive transmission in changing complex environments. We show that adjustable robust optimization builds up protection upon the adaptive resource allocation in interference limited cellular broadband systems, yet maintains the flexibility to tune it according to temporally changing demand. Another tool we propose is based on a data driven approach called Support Vectors. We develop adaptive transmission policies to select the right set of transmit parameters in MIMO-OFDM wireless systems. While we don't explicitly consider all the related parameters, learning based algorithms implicitly take them all into account and result in the adaptation policies that fit optimally to the given environment. We extend the result to multicast traffic and show that the distributed algorithm combined with a data driven approach increases the system performance while keeping the required overhead for information exchange bounded.