CAREER: A Network Information Theoretic Approach to Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

With the recent advances in theory, technology and applications of wireless communications a vision of the next generation wireless systems arises to be that of communicating arbitrarily correlated data, in arbitrarily structured networks, in challenging physical layer conditions, using wireless devices that are more flexible in terms of their transmitting/receiving capabilities and in terms of the boundaries between the layers of their protocol stack. The goal of this research is to develop a comprehensive information theoretic framework for determining the ultimate capacity limits of such networks and for developing efficient coding, transmission, reception and decoding schemes to be used in such networks. The research is structured into four heavily interrelated parts: network, data, tools, and channel. This research investigates the capacity regions and capacity achieving transmit/receive coding/decoding schemes of basic network structures that are building blocks of general ad-hoc multi-hop wireless networks, with an emphasis on the interference channel. This research develops principles of communicating correlated and common data. Specifically, the investigator determines the optimum coding and transmission schemes for correlated/common data and also studies the trade-offs between performance and complexity; in particular, the loss in performance when the source-channel separation principle is enforced. This research develops new tools and integrates and jointly optimizes some of the existing tools; the emphasis is on the joint optimization of user cooperation and power control. This research integrates the fading nature of the wireless communication channel into all of the problem formulations. The existence of fading in the channel can be both challenging and fortuitous, more the latter, if it is carefully exploited to the advantage of the network capacity. The investigator incorporates the existence of the channel fading into the capacity evaluations (hence, ergodic and outage capacities), into coding and transmission schemes for common/correlated data, and also into the development of the tools. ------------------