Events Calendar

Analyzing Large Wired and Wireless Networks

Speaker: Shirin Jalali, Ph.D., The Center for Mathematics of Information, California Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Analyzing Large Wired and Wireless Networks

Abstract: Emergence of the Internet and mobile wireless networks has given rise to large networks involving hundreds or thousands of users and relay nodes. While such networks have been around for a few decades, our limited resources in addition to the ever-increasing demands have pushed these networks to their limits. For instance, in cellular networks dropped calls are becoming a norm in populated areas these days. This demands for a fresh look at the problem of communication over large networks. While computing the high-dimensional capacity region of such networks is still of interest, in many cases it is more crucial to answer other fundamental questions such as the structure of capacity-achieving codes, or the amount of loss incurred by applying the existing codes. Answering these types of questions helps us strategize in terms of improving the performance of a given network, by either designing more efficient communication algorithms or redesigning the network's structure. In this talk, I will discuss some new approaches for analyzing large wired and wireless networks. In particular, I will describe new methods that allow us to answer questions about general noisy networks without computing their capacity regions. I will also explain a new hierarchical network analysis approach. For a given network, this new method enables us to find simpler networks of smaller sizes whose capacity regions provide upper or lower bounds on the capacity region of the original network. This is based on a joint work with Michelle Effros and Tracey Ho.

Biography: Shirin Jalali received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from Stanford University in 2009, in Electrical Engineering and Statistics, respectively. Since then, she has been a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Mathematics of Information at California Institute of Technology. She has received her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2002 and her M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the same institution in 2004. Her main researchinterests are information theory and statistical signal processing. She is particularly interested in problems in network information theory and universal compression, acquisition and denoising.


Host: Prof. Urbasi Mitra

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 110

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia Veal