Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2007

Opportunities and Challenges in Networking: A Unifying Approach

Speaker: Atilla Eryilmaz

Affiliation: MIT

Date: Monday, March 12, 2007

Talk: 11:00 pm, 366 WVH

Abstract

The next generation of networks is expected to support a wide variety of applications in dynamic, interference-constrained, unreliable, and resource-limited network settings. These systems with such diverse demands necessitate a radically new approach to network design urging a cross-disciplinary effort that spans various areas of information sciences, decisions and systems engineering, computer science, mathematics, and economics. This talk will demonstrate the success of this general unifying approach through the discussion of our recent works in the area of "Network Coding".

Network coding is a novel data transmission strategy that promises significant throughput gains over traditional routing strategies. Although there has been much recent research on this new strategy, significant questions remain on its practical implementation and a fundamental understanding of its performance. In this talk, I will describe our recent works that have provided answers to both of these vital questions.

First, I will present a new algorithm for implementing intersession network coding in general networks. The main innovation would be to show that the ideas underpinning network coding can be extended to serve multiple sessions by allowing coding across sessions. I will present a novel routing/scheduling/coding algorithm that provides a practical method to apply network coding to multiple point-to-point sessions. This algorithm is shown to achieve any rate within the largest known achievable rate region for intersession network coding. Some information about a multi-institution DARPA project, in which this algorithm is scheduled to be implemented, will also be presented.

Second, the challenging problem of the delay performance of network coding will be addressed. I will introduce a key scenario that will be used to reveal the significant delay gains obtained from network coding over traditional strategies. This is the first work that quantifies these gains. Further, I will explain how these gains translate into economic benefits in a dynamic setting. I will conclude with a brief overview of several other projects inspired by the unifying approach that also led to fundamental and surprising findings.

Brief Biography

Atilla Eryilmaz received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Since 2005, he has been working as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include wireless and sensor networks, algorithms, optimization theory, stochastic processes and network coding.