Exploring Source Codes for Network Technologies

网络系统和应用，包括无线语音网络、互联网和视频服务等成熟技术，以及无线多媒体、分布式计算和无处不在计算等新兴技术，都在经历爆炸性增长。虽然这些系统在许多方面不同，但它们都有一个共同的关键瓶颈：每种技术的实用性都受到可以通过相应网络发送的信息量的限制。由于带宽稀缺，因此最大限度地利用可用的数据速率至关重要。因此，使用高效的数据表示或源代码，对于最大化网络技术中的系统性能是必不可少的。这项研究考虑了网络系统中源代码编码的新范式，并将这些范式与现有方法进行了比较。分析包括概念的理论证明、在真实数据集上实际取得的收益的演示，以及为实现这些收益而开发的有效代码。目前的工作集中在广播系统的信源编码上。广播系统在上述所有网络技术中发挥核心作用，其中一个系统节点向网络中的其他节点“广播”公共信息(针对所有用户)和特定信息(针对部分用户)。广播系统中用于信源编码的现有方法使用(单发送器、多接收器)广播系统内的传统(单发送器、单接收器)源代码的集合。目前的工作旨在展示和量化通过放弃这种方法而支持为广播系统优化的源代码所获得的收益。

Network systems and applications, including both established technologies like wireless voice networks, the internet, and video services and emerging technologies like wireless multimedia, distributed computing, and ubiquitous computing, are undergoing explosive growth. While these systems differ in many ways, a key bottleneck is common to all of them: The utility of each of these technologies is limited by the amount of information that can be sent through the corresponding network. Since bandwidth is scarce, making the best use possible of the data rates available is critical. Thus use of efficient data representations, or source codes, is imperative for maximizing system performance in network technologies. This research considers new paradigms for source coding in network systems and compares those paradigms to existing approaches. The analysis involves theoretical proof of concept, demonstration of practically achieved gains on real data sets, and development of efficient codes to achieve those gains. Current work focuses on source coding for broadcast systems. Broadcast systems play a central role in all of the above network technologies, where one system node ``broadcasts'' both common information (intended for all users) and specific information (intended for a subset of the users) to the other nodes in the network. Existing methods for source coding in broadcast systems use collections of traditional (single-transmitter, single-receiver) source codes within the (single-transmitter, multiple-receiver) broadcast system. Current work aims to demonstrate and quantify the gains achieved by abandoning this approach in favor of source codes optimized for broadcast systems.