On Information Transmission
Mahesh Varanasi
Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering
Date and time:
Friday, April 12, 2013 - 12:45pm
Abstract:
This talk will start by providing some simple examples of communication schemes for the reliable transmission of information over certain communication channels. The
point-to-point data communication problem will then be introduced from the perspective of information theory. The key problem here is to establish the fundamental limit on the (highest) rate at which information can be reliably transmitted over a noisy communication channel. Recent research in my group has been on the information theory of wireless communication networks (viewed as channels). There are numerous challenges in such networks, with an important one being the effect of broadcasting from transmitters, wherein a transmitter’s signal is “heard” at unintended receivers, thereby causing interference at those receivers. I will present a simple network communication scheme that explicitly deals with interference and about which it is possible to provide an information theoretic optimality guarantee, albeit in an approximated sense. I hope to make this talk accessible to even beginning graduate students in applied mathematics with no prior knowledge of information theory.