Communication and Coding over Networks: New Challenges

The number and the complexity of mobile devices are growing rapidly and the current wireless technologies are fast approaching their physical limits. This necessitates new code designs for reliable, secure, and efficient communication in large and complex multi-user wireless networks. In the first part of this talk, we show how codes can be exploited in communication protocols in order to guarantee security on top of conventional error-correction, while communicating at a rate that achieves the fundamental secrecy capacity limit. We also consider multiple-access communication channels and show how to efficiently achieve the fundamental capacity limits in this case as well, using the recently invented polar codes. In the second part of the talk, we consider subspace codes that are used to guarantee reliability for packet transmission over communication networks. We develop algebraic methods for list-decoding subspace codes that lead to significant improvement in their error-correction performance. In the last part of the talk, we consider multi-user communications in ultra-low-power networks designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. We present new coding schemes that extract information from colliding transmissions instead of conventionally ignoring them. This results in significantly improved throughput, as compared to existing protocols.
Hessam Mahdavifar received the B.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2007, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA, in 2009, and 2012, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. Since then, he has been with the Samsung Mobile Solutions Lab as a Staff Research Engineer. Concurrently, he has been affiliated with UCSD as a Research Scholar and Lecturer. His general research interests are in coding theory, information theory, algorithms, and game theory with applications in wireless communications, security, data storage, IoT, and biological systems. He has won several awards including the Best Paper Award in the 2015 IEEE International Conference on RFID, the UCSD Shannon Memorial Fellowship, and two Silver Medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad.