On Average Throughput and Alphabet Size in Network Coding

SPEAKER: Dr. Emina Soljanin, Bell LaboratoriesABSTRACT: Network coding, envisioned as an extension of multicommodity data routing, offers two main advantages with respect to routing. First, this technique offers large symmetric throughout (the one achievable uniformly by all receivers) benefits in some directed networks. Second, while optimal multicommodity routing is NP hard, network coding can be performed in a randomized and decentralized manner with high probability of success when the code alphabet size is sufficiently large. In this talk, we will settle the question about the benefits that network coding offers in directed multicast networks with respect to the receivers' average throughput achievable by routing. We will also address certain issues concerning the network code alphabet size as a tradeoff between routing and coding as well as between deterministic and randomized coding, and show that, for certain classes of networks, there are huge savings to be made in terms of alphabet size if one resorts to routing as opposed to coding with a small throughput loss, or to deterministic as opposed to random coding with no throughput loss.BIO: Emina Soljanin received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sarajevo University, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1986, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 1989 and 1994.
From 1986 to 1988, she worked in the Energoinvest Company, Bosnia and Herzegovina, developing optimization algorithms and software for power system control. After graduating from Texas A&M, she joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, where she now serves as a Distinguished Member Staff in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center. Her research interests are in the broad area of communications, information and coding theory as well as their applications in storage and wireless systems, and, more recently, quantum computation and statistics.
Dr. Soljanin was the recipient of the 1992 Texas A&M University Electrical Engineering Department Fouraker fellowship. She served as a Technical Proof-Reader, 1990-1992, and as the Associate Editor for Coding Techniques, 1997-2000, for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She was a co-chair for DIMACS Special Focus on Computational Information Theory and Coding 2001-2005.Host: Prof. Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu

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

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher