Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In this application, we seek funding to continue our research program in information theory and wireless communications. The research program concerns the development of advanced joint source-channel coding (JSCC) technology for improving the reliability, connectivity and speed of wireless communication networks and meeting the rapidly growing demand for seamless and ubiquitous wireless multimedia services. JSCC provides the right approach to construct the best codes for the efficient transmission of data sources over noisy channels, particularly under stringent delay and complexity constraints and for multi-user networks where Shannon's principle for the separation of data compression and channel coding fails to hold in general. Building on our experience and extensive achievements in JSCC, we will focus on the following four research objectives: (i) the information theoretic investigation of the JSCC error exponent for multi-user networks; (ii) the development of sophisticated discrete channel models to judiciously represent the behavior of soft-decision demodulated correlated fading multi-antenna channels; (iii) the design and analysis of powerful low-complexity JSCC techniques for wireless networks; (iv) the application of the above JSCC methods to wireless multimedia communications and sensor networks. This research project, which will feature the training of five graduate students (3 doctoral and 2 Masters) and one postdoctoral fellow per year, is anticipated to provide a deeper understanding of both the fundamental principles and the practical aspects of JSCC, thus positively contributing to a sustainable improvement of wireless communications and multimedia technologies.