Michael Gastpar (UC Berkeley, USA and EPFL, Switzerland)

 

In information-theoretic theorems, achievability arguments are typically established via the IID random coding argument: codewords are sampled randomly from a judiciously chosen probability distribution. By contrast, algebraic methods are used to develop practical encoding and decoding schemes of reasonable complexity. However, an emerging body of work has demonstrated that algebraic methods also have an important role to play in establishing the fundamental capacity limits of networks. That is, in certain scenarios, structured random coding arguments have been able to achieve rates beyond what is possible using the best known i.i.d. random coding methods. This phenomenon was first noticed in 1979 by Korner and Marton for the distributed compression of the parity of two dependent sources. More recently, several groups have shown that algebraic structure can significantly enhance performance in relay networks, interference channels, distributed source coding, distributed interference cancellation, and physical layer network coding, among others. The aim is to provide an accessible introduction to structured random codes and their applications in network information theory. We will start with random linear codes for discrete memoryless channels and move towards random lattice codes for Gaussian channels. To develop intuition, we will first review how these methods can be used to prove capacity results in classical settings. Afterwards, we will discuss several settings in which the inherent algebraic structure of the code provides some advantages. 

 

Sennur Ulukus (University of Maryland, USA) 

 

Information-theoretic physical-layer security has emerged in the past few years as a promising new approach to securing wireless communications. This field explores possibilities of providing security in the physical layer using techniques from information theory, communication theory and signal processing. This approach is a fundamental departure from the currently available cryptographic solutions in that the security it provides is unbreakable, provable and quantifiable (in bits/sec/hertz), and is effective even against computationally-unlimited adversaries. This approach exploits unique characteristics of the wireless medium, such as the inherent random fluctuations in the wireless channel, broadcast nature of wireless communications and overheard information, use of multiple antennas, carefully designed multi-user interactions, e.g., cooperative jamming, feedback, signal alignment, etc. In this lecture, I will cover security of single-user and multi-user wireless communication systems. I will start the lecture with Shannon's secrecy system and the one-time pad. I will introduce Wyner's wiretap channel and Csiszar-Korner's generalization of the wiretap channel. I will present the Gaussian wiretap channel, independent parallel wiretap channels, fading wiretap channel, and the MIMO wiretap channel. I will then talk about multi-user wiretap channels and introduce the multiple-access wiretap channel and cooperative jamming, multi-receiver wiretap channel, broadcast channel with confidential messages, relay channel and cooperative secrecy, and interference channel with confidential messages.

 

Amos Lapidoth (ETHZ, Switzerland)

 

In 1980 Gel'fand and Pinsker published two influential papers: on the capacity of channels with noncausal side information, and on the capacity of the semi-deterministic broadcast channel. In this talk I shall discuss these two results and present a recent result with Ligong Wang that unifies them. 

 

Finally, we will discuss implementation issues over the Hadoop Distributed File system. A working system that uses novel regenerating codes over Hadoop and a comparison to the Reed-Solomon HDFS system currently used in Facebook Data warehouses will be presented. 

1) Nicolo Michelusi    

Optimal transmission policies for energy harvesting devices

2) Marco Maso  

Channel Estimation Impact for LTE Small Cells based on MU-VFDM

3) Ralph Tanbourgi 

Adaptive Modulation and Coding in Interference-Limited Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

4) Melda Yuksel    

New Achievable Rate Regions for Broadcast Relay Channels: Compression for Two Destinations

5) Christoph Schmitz   

Reachability of the Capacity in Parallel Quantised Channels

6) Julia Vinogradova   

Source detection, power estimation, and localization in large dimensional sensor networks in the presence of unknown correlated noise