Access networks are often the rate-reach-reliability-quality bottleneck of end-to-end connections in wide area networks. Realizing the vision of truly broadband and ubiquitous access to almost everyone in the U.S. is a very difficult task, with many significant technical and socio-economic challenges. The goal of the FAST Copper project is to achieve more than 10x performance improvement in terms of end-user perceived throughput over the current digital subscriber line (DSL) networks, which enjoy more than 160 million users worldwide. This goal will be achieved through two threads of research: dynamic and joint optimization of resources in Frequency, Amplitude, Space, and Time (thus the name ‘FAST’) to overcome the attenuation and crosstalk bottlenecks, and the integration of communication, networking, computation, modeling, and distributed information management for architectural design of broadband access networks.

This talk will focus on three aspects of the FAST Copper project: Architecture, Frequency, and Amplitude. For Architecture, we will talk about how different network elements and different protocol layers interact with each other in the broadband access networks, and the trade-off between "time scale separation" and "function modularization". For Frequency, we consider the spectrum management problem at the physical layer, which can be modeled by a nonconvex and tightly coupled optimization problem. We show that, by exploiting the unique characteristics of the multi-carrier interference channels, we are able to design autonomous spectrum balancing algorithms that do not require any explicit information exchange among DSL modems, have low complexity, yet achieve near optimal rate region. For amplitude, we show how to combine the adaptive capability of the physical layer and the stochastic characteristics of the link layer traffic to achieve a maximum admission region for the network.

Dr. Huang has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University since November 2005. Starting from August 2007, he will work as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the B.S degree in Electrical Engineering from Southeast University (Nanjing, Jiangsu, China) in 2000, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA) in 2003 and 2005, respectively. In 2004 and 2005, he worked in the Mathematics of Communication Networks Group at Motorola (Arlington Heights, IL, USA) both as a full time summer intern and a part time researcher. In 1999, he worked as a summer intern in the Department of Change Management at GKN Westland Aerospace (Cowes, Isle of Wight, UK). His main research interests lie in the area of communications and networking, with specific areas including cognitive radio networks, wideband OFDM and CDMA systems, wireless medium access control, multimedia communications, cooperative communications, and wired DSL broadband access networks.

Dr. Huang is an Associate Editor of (Elsevier) Journal of Computer & Electrical Engineering, the Lead Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications special issue on Game Theory in Communication Systems, the Lead Guest Editor of the Journal of Advances in Multimedia special issue on Collaboration and Optimization in Multimedia Communications, and a Guest Editor of the Journal of Advances in Multimedia special issue on Cross-layer Optimized Wireless Multimedia Communications. He has been serving as the TPC member for conferences such as IEEE GlobeCom, ICCCN, CCNC, and CrownCom. Dr. Huang is the recipient of a 2001 Walter P. Murphy Fellowship at Northwestern University and a 1999 Chinese National Excellent Student Award.