Workshop Overview

According to the International Association for the Wireless Industry CTIA, there were 180 million mobile phone subscribers in the U.S. at the end of 2004. Worldwide, there will soon be 2 billion subscribers. From these figures it is not difficult to see that wireless communication, a technology that is based on the interplay of many sciences, is revolutionizing the way we communicate. In this workshop, three experts in wireless communication will discuss mathematical, technical, algorithmic, and protocol issues that made wireless communication possible and that will enable future wireless systems with more throughput, wider coverage, higher reliability, and new applications.

Remark: This workshop was held on April 18, 2005 as part of the Computational Sciences Lecture Series (CSLS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Approximately Universal Codes over Slow Fading Wireless Channels

By Prof. Pramod Viswanath (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Slides of talk [PDF] | Video [WMV]

ABSTRACT: The tradeoff between data rate and reliability of reception is a fundamental issue in theory and practice of communication. In this talk, we try to understand the nature of this tradeoff in a slow fading wireless channel. In particular, we will precisely characterize codes that optimally tradeoff these two quantities for every statistical characterization of the wireless channel. This characterization is then used to construct new coding schemes as well as to show optimality of several schemes proposed in the space-time coding literature.

Quantum Computing and Cellular Phones

Prof. Rob Calderbank (Princeton University, USA)

Slides of talk [PDF] | Video [WMV] | Video [MPEG1] | Video [Other MPEG formats]

ABSTRACT: Multiple antennas are transforming the rate, reliability and reach of wireless systems. Quantum computers are calling into question the security of cryptosystems where security rests on the presumed intractability of factoring. The speaker, Dr. Robert Calderbank, an AT&T Fellow and co-inventor of space-time codes, will use nineteenth century mathematics to connect these two breakthrough technologies.

Proactive Design for Multimedia Communication Systems with Resource and Information Exchanges

By Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar (University of California at Davis, USA)

Slides of talk [PDF] | Video [WMV]

ABSTRACT: Due to their flexible and low cost infrastructure, the Internet and wireless networks are poised to enable a variety of multimedia applications, such as videoconferencing, emergency services, surveillance, telemedicine, remote teaching and training, augmented reality, and distributed gaming. However, these networks provide dynamically varying resources with only limited support for the Quality of Service required by the delay-sensitive, bandwidth-intense and loss-tolerant multimedia applications . This variability of resources does not significantly impact delay-insensitive applications (e.g., file transfers), but has considerable consequences for multimedia applications and often leads to unsatisfactory user experience.

To address these challenges, my research is focused on investigating the theory, algorithm design, implementation, and performance analysis of realistic multimedia systems, in order to gain new insights on what basic principles underlie efficient designs, and use these insights to advance the theory and tool-set for building optimized multimedia compression and transmission algorithms, theories and applications.

In this talk, I will discuss a new proactive algorithm and system design that fundamentally changes the non-collaborative way in which competing wireless stations currently interact, by allowing them to exchange information and resources to improve the performance of multimedia applications.