Abstract: Wireless relays will play an important role in future wireless communication networks. This talk will focus on the new concept of buffer-aided relaying. In conventional relay protocols, the schedule of when the different nodes in the network transmit is pre-fixed and non-adaptive. In contrast, buffer-aided relaying protocols exploit the additional degrees of freedom introduced by relays with buffers and employ an adaptive transmission schedule which takes into account the quality of the different links in the network. We will show that this new approach leads to substantial performance improvements in relay networks with fading links. In particular, buffer-aided relays enable significant gains in throughput as well as outage and error probability at the expense of an increased delay. These gains are introduced by adaptive link selection and/or adaptive transmission mode selection. We will first introduce the basic concept of buffer-aided relaying using the example of a simple three node one-way relay network before considering more complex networks such as relay-selection networks, multi-antenna relay networks, and two-way relay networks. We show that in some cases buffer-aided relaying protocols can double both the diversity gain and the throughput compared to conventional relaying protocols. Furthermore, in multi-antenna networks, buffer-aided relaying can also help to overcome the performance loss that half-duplex relays typically suffer compared to full-duplex relays.
Robert Schober received the Diplom (Univ.) and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuermberg in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From May 2001 to April 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From 2002 to 2012 he was a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Wireless Communications at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Since January 2012 he is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor and the Chair for Digital Communication at the Friedrich Alexander University (FAU), Erlangen, Germany. His research interests fall into the broad areas of Communication Theory, Wireless Communications, and Statistical Signal Processing. Dr. Schober received several awards for his research including the 2002 Heinz Maier–Leibnitz Award of the German Science Foundation (DFG), the 2004 Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications, the 2006 UBC Killam Research Prize, the 2007 Wilhelm Friedrich Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the 2008 Charles McDowell Award for Excellence in Research from UBC, a 2011 Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and a 2012 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship. In addition, he received best paper awards from the German Information Technology Society (ITG), the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP), IEEE WCNC 2012, IEEE Globecom 2011, IEEE ICUWB 2006, the International Zurich Seminar on Broadband Communications, and European Wireless 2000. Dr. Schober is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. Dr. Schober has served as Editor and Guest Editor on the Editorial Boards of several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, the Eurasip Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, and IEEE Sensors. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications.
Wednesday, 7 May, 10:15-11:15.
Title: How much can we gain by exploiting buffers in wireless relay networks?
Thursday, 8 May, 10:15-11:15.
Title: Real-Time Network Modulation for Intractable Epilepsy.
Thursday, 8 May, 09:00-10:00.
Title: Information Theory for High Throughput Sequencing.
Abstract: A coding method for line networks with edge and node capacity constraints and broadcast channels (BCs) is specified. An information-theoretic edge-cut bound shows that the method achieves capacity for several interesting cases. The results are based on joint work with Sadegh Tabatabaei Yazdi.
Gerhard Kramer is Alexander von Humboldt Professor and Head of the Institute for Communications Engineering at the Technische Universität München (TUM). He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada in 1991 and 1992, respectively, and the Dr. sc. techn. (Doktor der technischen Wissenschaften) degree from the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, he was with Endora Tech AG, Basel, Switzerland, as a communications engineering consultant. From 2000 to 2008 he was with the Math Center, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Murray Hill, NJ, as a Member of Technical Staff. He joined the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, as a Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2009. He joined TUM in 2010.
Abstract: Epilepsy affects three million patients in the United States. In many patients with pharmacologically refractory seizures, the only effective treatment is the neurosurgical resection of abnormally synchronized hyperexcitable brain regions—the seizure onset zone. Resection carries a risk of damaging important cognitive functions, and thus creating an effective non-resective option is critical to the welfare of millions of patients.
It is now believed that the future of epilepsy research lies in building an implantable device that prevents the brain from going into a hyperactive state, similar to how a pacemaker controls abnormal heart rhythms. The implanted device should monitor the neural activity in real-time and then apply electrical stimulation designed to modulate the connectivity of the seizure network adaptively and selectively. In this presentation, we propose a paradigm to capture the dynamic, frequency dependent connectivity of the brain from real-time monitoring of the brain using ECoG (i.e., ElectroCorticoGraphy) and then identifying the “optimal” stimulation parameters to modulate the connectivity with temporal and spatial precision. In particular, we will demonstrate how we leverage from directed information, detection, and estimation to determine ideal stimulation protocols and develop a roadmap for reparative therapies.
Behnaam Aazhang received his B.S. (with highest honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignin 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively. From 1981 to 1985, he was a Research Assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois. In August 1985, he joined the faculty of Rice University, Houston, Texas, where he is now the J.S. Abercrombie Professor and Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition, Dr. Aazhang holds an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor Programme (FiDiPro) working with the Center for Wireless Communication (CWC) at the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland. His research interests are in the areas of communication theory, information theory, signal processing, and their applications to wireless communication with a focus on the interplay of communication systems and networks; including network coding, user cooperation spectrum sharing, and opportunistic access. Signal processing, information processing, and their applications to neuro-engineering with a focus on the real-time closed-loop stabilization of neuronal systems to mitigate disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson, tremors, depression, and obesity. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC) at Rice.
Abstract: Extraordinary advances in sequencing technology in the past decade have revolutionized biology and medicine. Many high-throughput sequencing based assays have been designed to make various biological measurements of interest. A key computational problem is that of assembly: how to reconstruct from the many millions of short reads the underlying biological sequence of interest, be it a DNA sequence or a set of RNA transcripts? Traditionally, assembler design is viewed mainly as a software engineering project, where time and memory requirements are primary concerns while the assembly algorithms themselves are designed based on heuristic considerations with no optimality guarantee. In this talk, we outline an alternative approach to assembly design based on information theoretic principles. Starting with the question of when there is enough information in the reads to reconstruct, we design near-optimal assembly algorithms that can reconstruct with minimal amount of read information. We illustrate our approach in two settings: DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing. We report preliminary results from ShannonDNA, a DNA assembler, and ShannonRNA, a RNA assembler, and compare their performance both with the fundamental limits and with state-of-the-art software in the field.
David Tse received the B.A.Sc. degree in systems design engineering from University of Waterloo in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1994 respectively. From 1994 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories. Since 1995, he has been at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently a Professor. He received a 1967 NSERC graduate fellowship from the government of Canada in 1989, a NSF CAREER award in 1998, the Best Paper Awards at the Infocom 1998 and Infocom 2001 conferences, the Erlang Prize in 2000 from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the IEEE Communications and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Awards in 2001 and 2013, the Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2003, the 2009 Frederick Emmons Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, a Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering in 2012, the Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2012 and the Stephen O. Rice Paper Award in 2013. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2001 to 2003, the Technical Program co-chair in 2004 and the General co-chair in 2015 of the International Symposium on Information Theory. He is a coauthor, with Pramod Viswanath, of the text "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication", which has been used in over 60 institutions around the world.
Wednesday, 7 May, 09:00-10:00.
Title: Network Coding and Edge-Cut Bounds for Line Networks.
Keynote Speakers
May 7 and 8, 2014
Sharif University of Technology
Tehran, Iran
Iran Workshop on Communication and Information Theory
IWCIT 2014
This page has been updated on March 26, 2014
IWCIT 2014