Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM / 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Igor Kadota, Northwestern University
Abstract: Emerging applications, such as autonomous vehicles and smart factories, increasingly rely on sharing time-sensitive information for monitoring and control. In such application domains, it is essential to keep information fresh, as outdated information loses its value and can lead to system failures and safety risks. The Age-of-Information (AoI) captures the freshness of the information from the perspective of the destination. In this talk, we consider a wireless network with an edge-node receiving time-sensitive information from a number of sensing-nodes through unreliable channels. We formulate a discrete-time decision problem to find a transmission scheduling policy that optimizes the AoI in the network. We develop low-complexity scheduling policies with performance guarantees, including a randomized policy and a Max-Weight policy. Leveraging our theoretical results, we propose WiSwarm: an AoI-based application layer middleware that enables the customization of WiFi networks to the needs of time-sensitive applications. To demonstrate the benefits of WiSwarm in real operating scenarios, we implement a mobility tracking application using a swarm of UAVs communicating with a central controller (i.e., the edge-node) via WiFi.
Bio: Igor Kadota is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University. He received the Ph.D. degree from MIT LIDS and his B.Sc. degree from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA) in Brazil. His research is on modeling, analysis, optimization, and implementation of next-generation communication networks, with the emphasis on time-sensitive applications. Igor was a recipient of several research, teaching, and mentoring awards, including the Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2018, the Best Paper Award Finalist at ACM MobiHoc 2019, the Best Student Paper Award at WiOpt 2024 and at WiOpt 2025, and the MIT School of Engineering Graduate Student Extraordinary Teaching and Mentoring Award of 2020. For additional information, please see: http://www.igorkadota.com