The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is poised to advance all aspects of modern society by enabling ubiquitous communications and... Show moreThe Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is poised to advance all aspects of modern society by enabling ubiquitous communications and computations. In the IoT era, an enormous number of devices will be connected wirelessly to the internet in order to enable advanced data-centric applications. The projected growth in the number of connected wireless devices poses new challenges to the design and optimization of future wireless networks. For a wireless network to support a massive number of devices, advanced physical layer and channel access techniques should be designed, and high-dimensional decision variables should be optimized to manage network resources. However, the increased network scale, complexity, and heterogeneity, render the network unamenable to traditional closed-form mathematical analysis and optimization, which makes future high-density wireless networks seem unmanageable. In this thesis, we study the design and data-driven optimization of future high-density wireless networks operating over the unlicensed band, including Radio Frequency (RF)-powered wireless networks, solar-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based wireless networks, and random Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) wireless networks. For each networking scenario, we first analyze network dynamics and identify performance trade-offs. Next, we design adaptive network controllers in the form of high-dimensional multi-objective optimization problems which exploit the heterogeneity in users' wireless propagation channels and energy harvesting to maximize the network capacity, manage battery energy resources, and achieve good user capacity fairness. To solve the high-dimensional optimization problems and learn the optimal network control policy, we propose novel, cross-layer, scalable, model-based and model-free data-driven network optimization and resource management algorithms that integrate domain-specific analyses with advanced machine learning techniques from deep learning, reinforcement learning, and uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, convergence of the proposed algorithms to the optimal solution is theoretically analyzed using mathematical results from metric spaces, convex optimization, and game theory. Finally, extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our network optimization and resource management techniques compared with existing methods. Our research contributions provide practical insights for the design and data-driven optimization of next generation high-density wireless networks. Show less
