Keynote Speakers

Title

Context Aware Wireless Networks: A Physical Layer Perspective

Abstract

The recent surge in wireless data usage has demonstrated one important fact--our networks are not ready for application-rich mobile Internet. All of our current wireless architectures, including Wi-Fi and cellular, are based on interference avoidance, which advocates eliminating simultaneous transmissions to avoid collisions at the receivers. In contrast, if neighboring nodes pool their resources, and cooperate in their signal transmissions, the network could turn interference to its advantage for potentially large increase in network capacity.

In this presentation, we propose a paradigm in which nodes cooperate by pooling power and bandwidth resources and where flows interact opportunistically to avoid interference and increase network utilization. In particular, we will explore location information and network awareness to develop MAC and physical layer strategies to significantly increase spectral and power efficiencies of the network.

Biography

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-Champaign in 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 of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition, he holds an Academy of Finland Distinguished Visiting Professorship appointment (FiDiPro) at the Center for Wireless Communication (CWC) in the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland. He has served as the founding director of Rice's Center for Multimedia Communications from 1998 till 2006. He has been a Visiting Professor at IBM Federal Systems Company, Houston, Texas, the Laboratory for Communication Technology at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and at Nokia Mobile Phones in Irving, Texas. His research interests are in the areas of communication theory, information theory, and their applications with emphasis on multiple access communications, cellular mobile radio communications, and wireless communication networks.

Dr. Aazhang is a Fellow of IEEE, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Communication Society, and also a recipient of 2004 IEEE Communication Society's Stephen O. Rice best paper award for a paper with A. Sendonaris and E. Erkip. He has been listed in the Thomson-ISI Highly Cited Researchers and has been keynote and plenary speaker of several conferences. Dr. Aazhang is a recipient of the Alcoa Foundation Award 1993, the NSF Engineering Initiation Award 1987-1989, and the IBM Graduate Fellowship 1984-1985, and is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu.

He has served on Houston Mayor's Commission on Cellular Towers 1998-2004, as the Editor for Spread Spectrum Networks of IEEE Transactions on Communications 1993-1998, the Treasurer of IEEE Information Theory Society 1995-1998, the Secretary of the Information Theory Society 1990-1993, the Publications Chairman of the 1993 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, San Antonio, Texas, the co-chair of the Technical Program Committee of 2001 Multi-Dimensional and Mobile Communication (MDMC) Conference in Pori, Finland, the chair of the Technical Program Committee for 2005 Asilomar Conference, Monterey, CA, the co-chair of the Technical Program Committee of International Workshop on Convergent Technologies (IWCT), Oulu, Finland, June 6-10, 2005, guest editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communication special issue on relay and cooperative communication in 2006 and for KICS Journal of Communication and Network (JCN) special issue on cooperative communication in 2007, the general chair of the 2006 Communication Theory Workshop, Dorado, Puerto Rico, the co-technical program chair of 2008 WPMC in Lapland, Finland, and the co-general chair of 2010 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), in Austin, Texas.

Title

Seamless Support for End-to-End Gigabit Throughput in Cognitive Radio Mesh Networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio based mesh networking is an attractive approach for providing Internet connectivity to mobile users in malls, homes, business enterprises, public transport, and in-personal vehicles. In the near future, these networks must be able to support seamless mobility for multi-gigabit flows because there is a growing demand for such high data rates from applications such as media streaming, video conferencing, and high-definition mobile television. The challenge, however, is that factors such as packet losses, handoff latencies, and re-routing delays have more severe impact when data rate increases. In this talk, I will describe some of the techniques that have the potential to alleviate these problems.

For instance, techniques such as intra and inter-flow network coding, digraph diversity routing, distributed rate adaptation, and spare bandwidth exploitation are all likely to be parts of the solution needed to meet the gigabit throughput needs of next generation mobile users. I will describe an approach called Spare-bandwidth Rate Adaptive Network Coding (SRNC) which integrates some of these ideas to overcome the adverse impact of large bandwidth fluctuations caused by leasing and relinquishing of communication channels in cognitive radio networks. I will present simulation results to show that SRNC effectively combats the effects of large bandwidth fluctuations and thereby improves the end-to-end throughput of long-lived TCP flows from the Internet to the wireless hosts connected through the mesh network.

Biography

Parameswaran Ramanathan received the B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1984, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1986 and 1989, respectively.

Since 1989, Dr. Ramanathan has been faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he served as a Deaprtment Chair from 2005-2009. He leads research projects in the areas of sensor networks and next generation cellular technology. In 1997-98, he took a sabbatical leave to visit research groups at AT&T Laboratories and Telcordia Technologies. He was also a Visiting Professor at Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 2004.

Dr. Ramanathan's research interests include wireless and wireline networking, real-time systems, fault-tolerant computing, and distributed systems. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing (1996--1999) and Elsevier AdHoc Networks Journal (2002--2005). He has also served on program committees of conferences such as Mobicom, Mobihoc, International Conferences on Distributed Systems and Networks, Distributed Computing Systems, Fault-tolerant Computing Symposium, Real-time Systems Symposium, Conference on Local Computer Networks, and International Conference on Engineering Complex Computer Systems. He is presently serving as the General Chair of Mobicom (2011). He was the Finance and Registration Chair for the Fault-tolerant Computing Symposium (1999). He was the program co-chairman of the Workshop on Dependendability Issues in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks and Sensor Networks, Workshop on Sensor Networks and Applications (2003), Broadband Wireless (2004), Workshop on Architectures for Real-time Applications, 1994 and the program vice-chair for the International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-time Systems, 1996.

He is a Fellow of IEEE.