ECE Chairs Seminar Series - Channel Coding and the Benefits of Cooperation

The Electrical and Computer Engineering department will be hosting a seminar featuring Tom Fuja, Professor and Chair of Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Notre Dame. The topic of the seminar will be Channel Coding and the Benefits of Cooperation.

Abstract

Cooperative diversity is the name given to the benefits that accrue when different users in a wireless network cooperate with one another – typically by acting as relays for one another – in a way that ameliorates the effect of signal fading. This talk will show how structures used in channel coding (“error control codes”) can be leveraged to provide performance gains in a cooperative framework in which multiple users work together to convey their data to a common destination. Our motivating insight: In such a system, when a user transmits a signal that includes both “local” and “relayed” information, at least some other user(s) in the network already know(s) the relayed information – the users where that relayed information originated – and the transmitted signal should be constructed in such a way that this knowledge can be exploited. From a coding perspective, this means designing a coded signal that will be decoded by different users, some with partial knowledge about the encoded data and others without that knowledge. Examples of techniques drawn from convolutional coding, low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, and bandwidth-efficient coded modulation will be presented.

In light of this talk being part of the ECE Chairs Seminar series, I will also take a few minutes to tell you about EE at Notre Dame – our trajectory, challenges, and successes.

Speaker Bio

Tom Fuja received his undergraduate education at the University of Michigan and his graduate education at Cornell University. Since 1998, he’s been a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, where he is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering. From 1987 to 1998, Fuja was on the faculty of the University of Maryland; in addition, he served as Program Director for Communications Research at the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1997 and 1998. He was Associate Editor at Large of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1998 to 2001, and in 2002, Prof. Fuja was the President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Fuja's research interests lie in communications generally and coding/information theory specifically. Most of his recent research has focused on coding for wireless applications and on the intersection between channel codes and networking.

Note: If you need more information regarding this seminar, please contact Dr. Jia Wang in ECE, IIT. Phone: 7-3696, Email: jwang@ece.iit.edu