Network Coding for the Internet and Wireless Networks

In a network, imagine a pair of 100-Kbps streams arriving at a node from different directions and competing to be forwarded out of the node on a single 100-Kbps bottleneck link. How can both streams be forwarded through the bottleneck? The answer is: combine the two bit streams using XOR, send the combined stream through the bottleneck link at 100 Kbps, and finally untangle the streams at their destinations, using side information. This is an example of Network Coding, in which a small amount of linear processing at some of the nodes in a network can yield increases in throughput, decreases in delay, and decreases in energy (in a wireless network), relative to what can be achieved if only pure forwarding (no coding) is allowed. In this talk I will give an introduction to this new field in practical terms: how to improve communication in the Internet and wireless networks.
Phil Chou received the BSE and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton and Berkeley, respectively, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, 1988-1990. He was a Member of Research Staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, 1990-1996. And he was manager of the compression group at VXtreme, in Mountain View, CA (which developed the first commercial streaming video on demand over the Internet) before it was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. From 1998 to the present, he has been a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, where he currently manages the Communication and Collaboration Systems group. Dr. Chou also served as a consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University in 1994-1995, and has been an affiliate professor at the University of Washington since 1998. His research interests include data compression, information theory, communications, and pattern recognition, with applications to video, images, audio, speech, and documents. Dr. Chou was Associate Editor in source coding for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 1998-2001, and a Guest Associate Editor for special issues in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia in 1996 and 2004, respectively. He was a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing technical committee (IMDSP TC), 1998-2004. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and the IEEE Computer, Information Theory, Signal Processing, and Communications societies, and was an active member of the MPEG committee. He is the recipient, with Anshul Seghal, of the 2002 ICME Best Paper award, and is the recipient, with Tom Lookabaugh, of the 1993 Signal Processing Society Paper award.