Mapping Channel Coding over Networks for Reliable and Stable Communications

For many decades, channel coding methods, such as traditional Forward-Error-Correction (FEC), have played a pivotal role in providing reliable communications over a wide range of networks. Under traditional approaches, a sender adds redundancy and a receiver employs this redundancy to achieve reliable communications on an end-to-end basis. In this talk, two new trends in channel coding over wired and wireless networks will be covered. In the first part of the talk, new approaches that map and distribute channel coding functions over networks will be explored. These new approaches fall under the umbrella of a Network Channel Coding (NCC) framework. The NCC problem for a general network graph with multiple sources and destinations will be formulated. Recent solutions for the NCC problem will be described, and key examples of NCC will be presented. This includes distributed channel coding over multicast trees, distributed iterative decoding over low-power sensor networks, and the mapping of channel coding graphs over network topologies. In the second part of the talk, key shortcomings of popular wireless link-layer reliability methods (such as the ones used in 802.11 wireless LANs) will be highlighted. This motivates the development of new channel coding frameworks for achieving reliable and stable communications over wireless link layers. An example of such reliable and stable channel coding framework will be described.
Hayder Radha received the Ph.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in 1991 and 1993, the M.S. degree from Purdue University in 1986, and the B.S. degree (with honors) from Michigan State University (MSU) in 1984 (all in electrical engineering). Currently, he is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at MSU, the Associate Chair for Research of the ECE Department, and the Director of the Wireless and Video Communications Laboratory. Professor Radha was with Philips Research (1996- 2000), where he worked as a Principal Member of Research Staff and then as a Consulting Scientist in the Video Communications Research Department. Professor Radha was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories where he worked between 1986 and 1996 in the areas of digital communications, image processing, and broadband multimedia.
Professor Radha became a Fellow of the IEEE (2009), Philips Research Fellow (2000), and a Bell Labs’ Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (1992). He is an elected member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) and the IEEE Technical Committee on Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP). He served as Co-Chair and Editor of a Video Coding Experts Group of the International Telecommunications Union – Telecommunications Section (ITU-T) between 1994-1996. He serves on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and the Journal on Advances in Multimedia. He also served as a Guest Editor for the special issue on Network-Aware Multimedia Processing and Communications of the IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing. Professor Radha is a recipient of the Bell Labs Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Award, the AT&T Bell Labs Ambassador Award, AT&T Circle of Excellence Award, the MSU College of Engineering Withrow Distinguished Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to engineering, and the Microsoft Research Content and Curriculum Award. He is also a recipient of National Science Foundation (NSF) Theoretical Foundation, Network Systems, and Cyber-Trust awards. His current research areas include wireless communications and networking, sensor networks, network coding, video coding, stochastic modeling of communication networks, and image and video processing. He has more than 150 peerreviewed papers and 30 US patents in these areas.