Cooperative Wireless Networking: From Theory to Practice

Abstract

Wireless will be the dominant mode of internet access for end users in near future. However, bandwidth limitations of the wireless channel, interference from multiple users operating in the same band and channel variations due to fading become bottlenecks for typical multimedia applications that require high bandwidth and an error resilient communication medium. Cooperative networking, by enabling wireless terminals to assist each other in transmitting information to their desired destinations, provides a promising technology for improving the performance of wireless networks.

In this talk we provide an overview or cooperative wireless networking, and summarize some of our recent research activities that span multiple layers of the protocol stack. We describe the tradeoff between reliability and rate (also known as the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff) in cooperative systems. We study how cooperation of users can be used to manage interference.  By incorporating the notion of user cooperation at the medium access control (MAC) layer, we show how the benefits can be realized in a large network. We also outline our current efforts in building a large scale experimental cooperative networking testbed.

Biography

Elza Erkip received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. She joined Polytechnic University in Spring 2000, where she is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She spent 1996-1999 at Rice University 2007- 2008 at Princeton University.

Dr. Erkip received the NSF CAREER award in 2001, the Communications Society Rice Paper Award in 2004 and the ICC Communication Theory Symposium Best Paper Award in 2007.  She co-authored a paper that won the ISIT Student Paper Award in 2007. She is an  Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications, a Publications Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a Guest Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.