A Grand Challenge on Network Information Theory
- Jeffrey G. Andrews | University of Texas at Austin
Shannon’s information theory was a towering achievement of 20th century science and laid a theoretical foundation for understanding how to design communication systems, and to judge their optimality. However, the bedrock assumptions in the Shannon framework of unbounded delay and reliability are not appropriate for mobile ad hoc networks, which has rapidly changing topologies and end-to-end performance constraints. The lack of a descriptive theory for ad hoc networks has greatly impeded their design and commercialization.
In response to this roadblock, DARPA has recently initiated a $13.5m Grand Challenge to develop a new information theory capable of describing the performance limits of mobile wireless networks. UT Austin is leading this effort, with one of the two winning proposals, entitled “Non-equilibrium information theory”. In this talk, I will describe our vision for progressing towards this daunting goal, will present some preliminary results, and attempt to explain how this might affect the future design of wireless networks. (Project page: http://wncg.ece.utexas.edu/itmanet/index.php)
Speaker Details
Jeffrey G. Andrews received the B.S. in Engineering with High Distinction from Harvey Mudd College in 1995, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and Associate Director of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG). He developed Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems as an engineer at Qualcomm from 1995 to 1997, and has consulted for the WiMAX Forum, Microsoft, Palm, Ricoh, ADC, and NASA.Dr. Andrews is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He is co-author of the Prentice-Hall book, Fundamentals of WiMAX. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2007 and is the Principal Investigator of an eight university team of 13 faculty in DARPA’s Information Theory for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks program. More on him at: www.ece.utexas.edu/~jandrews