Stochastic modelling and control of communication networks

The unprecedented growth of the Information Technologies sector observed within the past years creates an excellent opportunity to conduct new, exciting and interdisciplinary research. Increasing complexity of the communication networks calls for incorporating rigorously developed and reliable methods for traffic control and management. Mathematics may offer extremely valuable tools to achieve these goals but transforming an engineering problem into the mathematical one requires a good understanding of the questions which arise in both domains. Furthermore, once the mathematical problem has been successfully dealt with, challenges in the application of the solution often arise back in the technical domain. In this thesis we address several research questions which arise when running modern communication networks. Our objective is to resolve these issues relying on the interplay between data measurements and mathematical theory.