Professor Tamer Basar
Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Professor of
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Coordinated Science Laboratory
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
3:00 P.M.
Center for Magnetic Recording Research Auditorium
Reception Following in the CMRR Lobby
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"Feedback and the Internet: Control Driving a Rapidly Advancing Technology"
Feedback has played a fundamental role in the technological advances of the twentieth century in almost all branches of engineering, enabling the delivery of the three requisites of a successful design, namely stability, robustness, and performance. To the long list of technologies that have benefited from feedback over the years, one can now add a new one|the Internet. Internet can be viewed as a very large scale heterogeneous network with a very large number of users, where the ultimate goal is to enable reliable communication under a fair allocation of the available resources, with all this to be done with minimum informational overhead and without precise modeling. The last couple of years have witnessed rapid progress in this arena, in both the conceptualization and the development of fundamental results, where feedback control again plays a central role. This lecture, targeted to a general engineering audience, will provide an overview of this rapidly advancing field, and show why feedback control theory is in the driver's seat in this development. It will describe the underlying issues in feedback design for the Internet, discuss what the current technology offers, and present some new architectures with improved performance. These architectures could some day replace those currently employed on the Internet, namely the transport control protocol (TCP) structures (such as TCP Reno) and active queue management (AQM) schemes (such as RED).
