Tuesday, May 27, 2008

My papers from ICC

My two papers from ICC:

A. W. Eckford and S. E. T. Hadley, “On estimating the topology of an adversarial wireless network,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Beijing, China, 2008. (PDF)

J. P. K. Chu, R. S. Adve, and A. W. Eckford, “Relay selection for low-complexity coded cooperation using the Bhattacharyya parameter,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Beijing, China, 2008. (PDF)

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

ICC Liveblog: May 22

(11:58 AM) A couple of nice papers in the morning. In WC-31 (Sensor Networks I), there was an interesting talk by Andreas Molisch on "mutual information accumulation" -- sort of like a rateless code across several sensor nodes, with optimization. In CT-09 (Coding and Modulation II), a talk by Natasa Blitvic on a clever low-complexity method for eliminating bad ISI patterns.

ICC Liveblog: May 21

(12:40 PM) Skipped the first morning session to work on my presentation, which was in session WN-11. The talk went quite well, but because the first two presenters did not show up, I ended up presenting early.

(5:28 PM) Interesting paper in CT-05 (Wireless Networks) by Zhu, Guo, and Honig about message-passing algorithms for interference reduction. Also a paper about "aggressive" hybrid ARQ -- I'd like to hear more about this, as I can't tell the difference between this method and the use of rateless codes, like Raptor codes. Also a neat paper about opportunistic scheduling (a.k.a. selection diversity?) with nodes whose signal strengths are independent but non-identically distributed -- surely a practical case that doesn't get much attention in the literature.

I stopped in at WC-28 (Cognitive Networks IV) to hear a bit about the state of the art in cognitive networking. Seems that this community realizes that a fully general radio to exploit free spectrum is not necessarily practical.

Monday, May 19, 2008

ICC Liveblog: May 20

(11:29 AM) Interesting keynote by Prof. Vince Poor on physical layer approaches to network problems, focusing on interaction among nodes. Three issues: "Economorphic" (i.e. competitive) networks, "Sociomorphic" (i.e., cooperative) networks, and physical layer security. Being largely aware of cooperative approaches, I was quite interested in the other two ... Nash equilibria are being used to illustrate fundamental physical tradeoffs in wireless networks, and physical layer security can show the fundamental limits of secure communication.

(4:03 PM) Attended CT01 -- Channel Capacity. Best paper: "Interference alignment and spatial degrees of freedom for the K user interference channel." A clever method for carefully arranging interference so as to align it in time or phase, and can hence be easily discarded (though it seems impractical for any real system).

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

See you in Beijing

I will be in Beijing next week for ICC 2008, where I have two papers:

"Relay selection for low-complexity coded cooperation using the Bhattacharyya parameter"
(in Cooperative Communication I: Session CT-02, May 20, 16:15-18:00, Room 310 BICC)

"On Estimating the Topology of an Adversarial Wireless Network"
(in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks IV: Session WN-11, May 21, 10:45-12:30, Room 311-B BICC)

I will be the speaker for the second paper. Hope to see you there.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Speaking in Zurich: May 13

I'll be in Zurich next week, and am tentatively scheduled to speak at ETH on May 13. (Anyone in Zurich who wants to get together ... send me an email!)

The talk announcement is here. Title and abstract are as follows:

Information theoretic aspects of molecular communication

In molecular communication, messages are transmitted by releasing a pattern of molecules at a transmitter, which propagate through a fluid medium towards a receiver. This form of communication has many advantages for nanotechnological applications, such as simplicity and low energy cost. In this talk, we give a discussion of molecular communication from an information theoretic perspective. Recent progress in molecular communication is surveyed. An idealized channel model is given, along with bounds on mutual information. Using these bounds, we see that surprisingly large amounts of information can be transmitted with tiny amounts of matter. Some applications and future work are also discussed.