Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

As a result of great advances in the areas of telecommunications, computers and electronics the boundaries between the different service providers have begun to erode. Thanks to technologies such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and IPTV, subscribers can receive their telephone, data services and entertainment from the same service provider. The integration of services, networks and media has resulted in emergence of strong demand for new services requiring considerably higher bandwidth than conventional applications. Providing these new services required by the customers at a competitive price is a challenging task for the communications industry. Another challenge is that with the increase in the number of mobile users requiring a level of service comparable to what they receive in their home or office, service provider have to be able to offer these emerging services anytime and anywhere. Facing these challenges requires optimized use of all physical resources available in the networks. The major objective of this research project is to develop data transmission strategies for distributed networks that approach as closely as possible the theoretical bounds on the maximum transfer rate and the best performance in terms of least possible bit error rate or the minimum distortion, given the resource constraints of these networks, namely power and bandwidth limitations. This objective will be pursued through an effort to find optimum cooperation strategies among the network nodes and to exploit the correlation between the information available at different nodes, the latter being particularly beneficial in the case of sensor networks. The basic enabling technologies used in order to come up with efficient collaborative transmission schemes will be distributed source coding (DSC), successive refinement, iterative source encoding, concatenated source and channel coding, and iterative detection. A unified approach to source and channel coding will be followed based on the information theoretical duality of these two procedures. We will use the duality of source and channel coding in order to develop efficient and robust source coding techniques.