Invited Short Talks

(Speakers listed below in name alphabet order)

Distinguished Professor, Tohoku University, Japan

Title: Spectrum-Energy Efficiency of Wireless Networks  (Talk Slides)
Time: 10:40-11:20, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014

Abstract:
The volume of wireless broadband data traffic has been continuously increasing. Because of limited available frequency bandwidth, the spectrum efficiency was the most important concern for the last few decades. However, due to the recent explosive popularity of broadband wireless data services, more and more attention has been paid to the energy efficiency. The spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency are in a tradeoff relationship. Probably, the most effective solution to improve both the spectrum and energy efficiencies at the same time is to use pico-cell or nano-cell structured wireless networks. However, an inherent nature of wide range of the user mobility in wireless networks is problematic for nano-cell structured networks. Remember that the traffic distribution is not uniform and that there may be only a few scattered hotspot areas of heavy traffic within a macro-cell area. The heterogeneous network consisting of macro-cell and nano-cell structures may be a practical solution. In this talk, we will discuss the spectrum-energy efficiency tradeoff and the need of heterogeneous network as a practical solution toward spectrum and energy efficient wireless networks.

Biography:
Fumiyuki Adachi received the B.S. and Dr. Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1973 and 1984, respectively. In April 1973, he joined the Electrical Communications Laboratories of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation (now NTT) and conducted various researches on digital cellular mobile communications. From July 1992 to December 1999, he was with NTT Mobile Communications Network, Inc. (now NTT DoCoMo, Inc.), where he led a research group on Wideband CDMA for 3G systems. Since January 2000, he has been with Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, where he is a Distinguished Professor at the Dept. of Communications Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering. His research interest includes wireless signal processing including wireless access, equalization, transmit/receive antenna diversity, adaptive transmission, and channel coding. He is an IEEE Fellow and an IEICE Fellow. He was a recipient of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Avant Garde Award 2000, IEICE Achievement Award 2002, Thomson Scientific Research Front Award 2004, Ericsson Telecommunications Award 2008, Telecom System Technology Award 2010, Prime Minister Invention Award 2010, and KDDI Foundation Excellent Research Award 2012.

Mario Gerla  (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Title: A New Approach to Coding in Content-Based MANETs
Time: 10:00-10:40, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014

Abstract:

In content-based mobile ad hoc networks (CB-MANETs), random linear network coding (NC) can be used to reliably disseminate large files under intermittent connectivity. Conventional NC involves random unrestricted coding at intermediate nodes. This however is vulnerable to pollution attacks. To avoid attacks, a brute force approach is to allow mixing only at the source. However, source restricted NC generally reduces the robustness of the code in the face of errors, losses and mobility induced intermittence. CB-MANETs introduce a new option. Caching is common in CB MANETs and a fully reassembled cached file can be viewed as a new source. Thus, NC packets can be mixed at all sources (including the originator and the intermediate caches) yet still providing protection from pollution. The hypothesis we wish to test in this paper is whether in CB-MANETs with replicated caches of a file, the performance (in terms of robustness) of the coding restricted to full caches equals that of unrestricted coding. In this paper, we examine and compare four options: unrestricted coding, full cache coding, source only coding, and no coding. As expected, we find that full cache coding remains competitive with unrestricted coding while maintaining full protection against pollution attacks.

Biography:
Dr. Mario Gerla is a Professor in the Computer Science Dept at UCLA. He holds an Engineering degree from Politecnico di Milano, Italy and the Ph.D. degree from UCLA. He became IEEE Fellow in 2002. At UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the early ARPANET protocols under the guidance of Prof. Leonard Kleinrock. He joined the UCLA Faculty in 1976. At UCLA he has designed network protocols including ad hoc wireless clustering, multicast (ODMRP and CODECast) and Internet transport (TCP Westwood). He has lead the ONR MINUTEMAN project, designing the next generation scalable airborne Internet for tactical and homeland defense scenarios. He is now leading several advanced wireless network projects under Industry and Government funding. His team is developing a Vehicular Testbed for safe navigation, content distribution, urban sensing and intelligent transport. Parallel research activities are wireless medical monitoring using smart phones and cognitive radios in urban environments. He has served as a Technical Program Committee member of many international conferences, and is active in the organization of conferences and workshops, including MedHocNet and WONS. He serves on the IEEE TON Scientific Advisory Board. He was recently recognized with the annual MILCOM Technical Contribution Award for 2011 and the IEEE Ad Hoc and Sensor Network Society Achievement Award in 2011.

Yunghsiang S. Han  (IEEE Fellow)
Chair Professor, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan

Title: Coding theory for reliable signal processing (Talk Slides)
Time: 10:00-10:40, Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014

Abstract:
With increased dependence on technology in daily life, there is a need to ensure their reliable performance. There are many applications where we carry out inference tasks assisted by signal processing systems. A typical system performing an inference task can fail due to multiple reasons: presence of a faulty component, a malicious component providing corrupt information, or there might simply be an unreliable component. Therefore, it is important to design systems which perform reliably even in the presence of such unreliable components. Coding theory based techniques provide a possible solution to this problem. In this position paper, we survey some recent developments in using coding theory based techniques for the design of some signal processing applications. As examples, we consider distributed classification and target localization tasks in wireless sensor networks. We also consider the more recent application of crowdsourcing and discuss how coding based techniques can be used to mitigate the effect of unreliable crowd workers in the system.

Biography:
Yunghsiang S. Han received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer and Information Science, Syracuse University, NY, in 1993.  He was with Hua Fan College of Humanities and Technology, National Chi Nan University, and National Taipei University, Taiwan. From August 2010, he is with the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology as a chair professor. Dr. Han's research interests are in error-control coding, wireless networks, and security. Dr. Han has conducting state-of-the-art research in the area of decoding error-correcting codes for more than twenty-four years. He first developed a sequential-type algorithm based on Algorithm A* from artificial intelligence. At the time, this algorithm drew a lot of attention since it was the most efficient maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm for binary linear block codes. Dr. Han has also successfully applied coding theory in the area of wireless sensor networks. He has published several highly cited works on wireless sensor networks such as random key pre-distribution schemes. He also serves as the editors of several international journals. Dr. Han was the winner of the Syracuse University Doctoral Prize in 1994 and a Fellow of IEEE.

Robert W. Heath  (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, University of Texas at Austin, USA
President and CEO, MIMO Wireless Inc, USA
Chief Innovation Officer, Kuma Signals LLC, USA

Title: Millimeter-wave Cellular Channel Models for System Evaluation (Talk Slides)
Time: 11:20-12:00, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014

Abstract:
With huge amount of (potentially) available spectrum, millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum is a promising candidate for the fifth generation cellular networks. This paper presents a channel model for evaluating system level performance in mmWave cellular networks. The model uses insights from measurement results that show mmWave is sensitive to blockages revealing different path loss characteristics between line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight links. The proposed model is used to compare microwave and mmWave networks in simulations. An insight is that mmWave networks can provide comparable coverage probability with a density deployment, leading to much higher data rates thanks to the large bandwidth available in the mmWave spectrum.

Biography:
Robert W. Heath Jr. received the Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group. He is also the President and CEO of MIMO Wireless Inc and Chief Innovation Officer at Kuma Signals LLC. Prof. Heath is a recipient of the 2012 Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper award and the 2010 and 2013 EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking best paper awards. He is the recipient of the David and Doris Lybarger Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering,  is a registered Professional Engineer in Texas, and is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a co-author on the upcoming book mmWave Wireless Communication: Systems and Circuits.

Professor, Ecole de technologie superieure ETS, Canada

Title: Joint Fountain Code-Network Coding Scheme for Reliable Communication in Wireless Networks  (Talk Slides)
Time: 10:40-11:20, Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014

Abstract:
Cooperative communications, where parallel relays forward information to a destination node provide a new dimension to the design space of wireless networks in which coverage and throughput may be significantly enhanced at the cost of a loss in spectral efficiency. In practice, the performance of data transmission often degrades due to the slow and deep fading of wireless channel even though various channel coding are used at the transmitter and receiver. However, it appears that no fixed rate channel coding is capable of driving the outage probability to zero without channel state information at the transmitter. In this paper we employ rateless coding and network coding for reliable communication in wireless relay network. Specially we propose joint network and fountain decoding (JNFD) that seamlessly couples fountain coding and network coding, and can effectively combat the detrimental effect of fading of wireless channels. Simulation results show that the propose JNFD demonstrates the significant performance improvement against other schemes.

Biography:

Kenichi Mase (IEEE/IEICE Fellow)
Prefessor Emeritus, Niigata University, Niigata, Japan

Title: Wide-Area Real-Time Surveillance Using Electric Vehicles and Helicopters for Disaster Recovery  (Talk Slides)
Time: 16:00-16:40, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014

Abstract:
In this presentation, we argue that small electric vehicles (mini-EVs) may become increasingly prevalent in the future, leading to the realization of the so-called ubiquitous EV society. EVs have the potential to be a great resource for recovery from large-scale disasters. Specifically, EVs in a disaster area can link together to form an EV-based mobile ad hoc network (EVANET). Two use cases of EVANET are emergency networks and disaster area surveillance. We present the concept of three-dimensional mobile surveillance (3DMS). In 3DMS, EVs on the ground cooperate with small lightweight unmanned electric helicopters (mini-EHs) to cooperatively collect and deliver information about the disaster area. We present an effective method of solving the problem of limited continuous flying time of EHs. We present a simple model for area zoning assuming a wide square area and one-dimensional EV placement. Specifically, each EV–EH pair is in charge of a non-overlappingsub-area and the surveillance data are temporarily stored in the EV. The partner EH is used to transfer the surveillance data, which are obtained in the sub-area in addition to those transferred fromthe immediate downstream EV, to the upstream EV via carry and forward. Finally, we investigate the requirements for a mini-EH in 3DMS. In particular, we demonstrate that autonomous piloting is necessary and present prototypes of a mini-EH.

Biography:
Kenichi Mase received the B. E., M. E., and Dr. Eng. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 1970, 1972, and 1983, respectively. He joined Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratories of NTT Public Corporation in 1972. He was Executive Manager, Communications Quality Laboratory, NTT Telecommunications Networks Laboratories from 1994 to 1996 and Communications Assessment Laboratory, NTT Multimedia Networks Laboratories from 1996 to 1998. He joined Niigata University in 1999 and is now Professor Emeritus, Niigata University, Niigata, Japan. He received IEICE Best Paper Award in 1994, the Telecommunications Advanced Foundation Award in 1998, and Best Paper Award, Internatioal Academy, Research, and Industry Association in 2013. His research interests include communications network design and traffic control, quality of service, mobile ad hoc networks and wireless mesh networks. He was President of IEICE-CS in 2008 and Vice President of IEICE in 2011 and 2012. Prof. Mase is an IEEE and IEICE Fellow.

Zhisheng Niu  (IEEE/IEICE Fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer)
Professor, Tsinghua University, China

Title: Energy-Delay Tradeoff in Hyper-Cellular Networks with Base Station Sleeping Control  (Talk Slides)
Time: 16:40-17:20, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014

Abstract:

One of the key approaches to make the mobile communication networks more GREEN (Globally Resource-optimized and Energy-Efficient Networks) is to have the cellular architecture and radio resource allocation more adaptive to the environment and traffic variations, including making some lightly-loaded base stations (BSs) go to sleep.  This is the concept of so-called TANGO (Traffic-Aware Network planning and Green Operation) and CHORUS (Collaborative and Harmonized Open Radio Ubiquitous Systems) published by the author earlier.  To realize this, a new cellular framework, named hyper-cellular networks (HCN), has been proposed, in which the coverage of control signals is decoupled from the coverage of data signals so that the data coverage can be more elastic in accordance with the dynamics of traffic characteristics and QoS requirements.  Due to this elasticity of HCN, some delay-insensitive users may have to experience some delay or other kind of QoS degradation when traffic load is high in order to save energy, i.e., energy can be traded off by some delay. The fundamental question then arises: how much energy can be traded off by a tolerable delay?

In this talk, we characterize the tradeoffs between energy consumption and service delay in a base station with sleep mode operations by queueing models.  The base station is modeled as an M/G/1 vacation queue with setup and close-down times, where the base station enters sleep mode if no customers arrive during the close-down time after the queue becomes empty and it starts to setup when it sees N arriving customers during its sleep period.  Several closed-form formulas are derived to demonstrate the tradeoffs between the energy consumption and the mean delay by changing the close-down time, setup time, and N.  It is shown that the relationship between the energy consumption and the mean delay is linear in terms of mean close-down time, but non-linear in terms of N.  The explicit relationship between total power consumption and average delay with varying service rate is also analyzed theoretically, indicating that sacrificing delay cannot always be traded for energy saving.  In other words, larger N may lead to lower energy consumption, but there exists an N* that minimizes the mean delay. We also investigate the maximum delay for certain percentage of service, which is closely related to the mean delay. In summary, the closed-form tradeoffs cast light on designing BS sleep control policies which aim to save energy while maintaining acceptable quality of service.

Biography:

Zhisheng Niu graduated from Northern Jiaotong University (currently Beijing Jiaotong University), Beijing, China, in 1985, and got his M.E. and D.E. degrees from Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Japan, in 1989 and 1992, respectively.  After spending two years at Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Kawasaki, Japan, he joined with Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1994, where he is now a professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering and the deputy dean of the School of Information Science and Technology.  His major research interests include queueing theory, traffic engineering, mobile Internet, radio resource management of wireless networks, and green communication and networks.

Dr. Niu has been an active volunteer for various academic societies, including council member of Chinese Institute of Electronics (2006-10), vice chair of the Information and Communication Network Committee of Chinese Institute of Communications (2008-12), Councilor of IEICE-Japan (2009-11), and membership development coordinator of IEEE Region 10 (2009-10).  In particular, in IEEE Communication Society, he has been serving as an editor of IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine (2009-12), director of Asia-Pacific Region (2008-09), director for Conference Publications (2010-11), chair of Beijing Chapter (2001-08), and members of Award Committee (2011-13), Emerging Technologies Committee (2010-12), On-line Content Committee (2010-12), and Strategy Planning Committee.  He has also been serving as general co-chairs of APCC’09/WiCOM’09, TPC co-chairs of APCC’04/ICC’08/WOCC’10/ICCC’12, panel co-chair of WCNC’10, tutorial co-chairs of VTC’10-fall/Globecom’12, and publicity co-chairs of PIMRC’10/WCNC’02.

Prof. Niu is a co-recipient of the Best Paper Awards from the 13th and 15th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communication (APCC) in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and received Outstanding Young Researcher Award from Natural Science Foundation of China in 2009.  He is now the Chief Scientist of the National Fundamental Research Program (so called “973 Project”) of China "Fundamental Research on the Energy and Resource Optimized Hyper-Cellular Mobile Communication System" (2012-2016), which is the first national project green communications in China.  He is the fellow of IEEE and IEICE, and a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Communication Society (2012-13).

Ness B. Shroff  (IEEE Fellow)
Ohio Eminent Scholar endowed chair in Networking and Communications, The Ohio State University, USA

Title: Designing provably efficient Map-Reduce Schedulers: A probabilistic approach  (Talk Slides)
Time: 11:20-12:00, Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014

Abstract:
We consider the problem of minimizing the total flow time of arriving jobs being served by a pool of machines under the so called constraint of phase precedence. This is a common occurrence in various job scheduling settings, and is becoming ubiquitous in the context of data center systems, where jobs need to be processed through both "MAP" and "Reduce" procedures before leaving the system. Under this setting one can show that no on-line algorithm can achieve a constant competitive ratio (defined as the ratio between the completion time of the online algorithm to the completion time of the optimal non-causal off-line algorithm). We then construct a new, slightly weaker metric of performance that we call the "efficiency ratio". An online algorithm is said to achieve an efficiency ratio of $\gamma$ when the flow-time incurred by that scheduler divided by the minimum flow-time achieved over all possible schedulers is almost surely less than or equal to $\gamma$. We then show a surprising property that for the flow-time problem any work-conserving scheduler has a constant efficiency ratio in both preemptive and non-preemptive scenarios. We develop an online scheduler with a very small efficiency ratio (less than 2), and through simulations we show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art schedulers.

This preliminary investigation suggests that this new metric could potentially yield a useful approach to analyze the performance (and thus design) of algorithms in general. It avoids the unlikely (measure zero) scenarios that need to be accounted for in competitive ratio analysis, yet retains the simplicity of such worse-case analysis.

Biography:
Ness B. Shroff  received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 1994. He joined Purdue university immediately thereafter as an Assistant Professor in the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering. At Purdue, he became Full Professor of ECE in 2003 and director of CWSA in 2004, a university-wide center on wireless systems and applications. In July 2007, he joined The Ohio State University, where he holds the Ohio Eminent Scholar endowed chair in Networking and Communications, in the departments of ECE and CSE. From 2009-2012, he served as a Guest Chaired professor of Wireless Communications at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and currently holds an honorary Guest professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University in China. His research interests span the areas of communication, social, and cyberphysical networks. He is especially interested in fundamental problems in the design, control, performance, pricing, and security of these networks. Dr. Shroff is a past editor for IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking and the IEEE Communication Letters. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Computer Networks Journal, IEEE Network Magazine, and the Networking Science journal. He has chaired various conferences and workshops, and co-organized workshops for the NSF to chart the future of communication networks. Dr. Shroff is a Fellow of the IEEE and an NSF CAREER awardee. He has received numerous best paper awards for his research, e.g., at IEEE INFOCOM 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2006, Journal of Communication and Networking 2005, Computer Networks 2003 (two of his papers also received runner-up awards at IEEE INFOCOM 2005 and INFOCOM 2013), and also student best paper awards (from all papers whose ﬁrst author is a student) at IEEE WiOPT 2013, IEEE WiOPT 2012 and IEEE IWQoS 2006.

Min Song
Program Director, NSF, USA

Title: Spectrum Sharing: Challenges, Directions, and Opportunities
Time: 16:00-0, Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014

Abstract:

Spectrum in U.S. is managed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for federal government use or by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for commercial and other non-federal use. Historically, spectrum was licensed for exclusive use. Due to the lack of incentives for spectrum sharing, this policy caused significant majority of the federal spectrum underutilized. With the rapidly proliferated wireless applications, spectrum significantly falls short of the ever-increasing demand. This spectrum shortage has drawn attention from the White House. In June 2010, the President of the United States issued a memorandum, which calls on the Federal Government to identify 500 MHz of spectrum to be made available for wireless broadband use. To advance the goals of the President’s memorandum, the Wireless Spectrum R&D (WSRD) Senior Steering Group (SSG) was formed to coordinate spectrum-related research and development activities across the Federal government. The recent PCAST report further recommends the Secretary of Commerce to identify 1,000 MHz of Federal spectrum in which to implement shared-use spectrum pilot projects. Indeed, it is imperative that abundant spectrum to be made available to meet the demand and to spur the economy growth. In this talk, we will outline the critical challenges from bothtechnical and non-technical point of views, and suggest the future directions on spectrum sharing. Some of our current research projects on spectrum sharing and access will also be presented. At the end of the talk, four NSF programs supporting the research on spectrum sharing and access will be briefly introduced.

Biography:
Dr. Min Song is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Toledo. Currently, he is serving the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a Program Director. Min received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toledo in 2001. Min’s research interests include the design, analysis, and evaluation of cognitive radio networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, cyber physical systems, and wireless ad-hoc networks. His research interests also include network security and mobile computing. Min’s professional career is comprised of a total 25 years in industry, academia, and government. Over the course of his career, Min has held various leadership positions and gained experience in performing a wide range of duties and responsibilities. Of most significance is his service with the NSF as a Program Director since October of 2010. Min is the recipient of NSF CAREER award.