Network Coding for Wireless Networks

SPEAKER: Prof. Muriel Medard, MITABSTRACT: The use of network coding in wireless networks has emerged as an active area of research both in the information theoretic and systems community. In this talk, we overview some of the main aspects of network coding for wireless systems. We consider both performance advantages, such as throughput, energy consumption and delay, and algorithmic issues. We show that network coding in multicast situations leads to simplified optimality conditions over routing-based approaches and to the possibility of distributed operation. For non-multicast cases, we show that network coding schemes are necessarily sub-optimal, yet even heuristics can significantly outperform traditional routing-based approaches. BIO: Muriel Medard is a Harold E. and Esther Edgerton Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the Associate Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Medard received B.S. degrees in EECS and in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as a Guest Editor for the Joint special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on Networking and Information Theory . She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking.
Professor Medard's research interests are in the areas of network coding and reliable communications, particularly for optical and wireless networks. She was awarded the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award 2002 for her paper, "The Effect Upon Channel Capacity in Wireless Communications of Perfect and Imperfect Knowledge of the Channel," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 46 Issue 3, May 2000, Pages: 935-946. She was co- awarded the Best Paper Award for G. Weichenberg, V. Chan, M. Medard, "Reliable Architectures for Networks Under Stress", Fourth International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2003), October 2003, Banff, Alberta, Canada. She received a NSF Career Award in 2001 and was co-winner 2004 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, established in 1982 to honor junior faculty members "for distinction in research, teaching and service to the MIT community."HOST: Prof. Michael J. Neely, mjneely@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher