CAREER: Error-control for Streaming Media: Architecture, Code Design, and Noisy Feedback

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Abstract:"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(Public Law 111-5)."Digital communication technology is central to the establishment and enhancement of global on-line communities. Increasingly, data networks convey delay-sensitive streaming content for voice, video, control, and interactive applications; data with characteristics for which networks have not traditionally been optimized. This project aims to rethink the fundamental architectures of digital communications to improve delivery of streaming data. The long-term potential is improved service at reduced cost, and broadened availability.The central technical question is how feedback should best be used to transmit delay-sensitive data in real-world systems that are faced with resource-constrained and noisy feedback. While a fundamental principle of robust system design, the use of feedback in ensuring reliable communication has been limited to higher layers of the OSI stack. This project explores the performance improvements made possible by taking advantage of feedback at the physical-layer. The principal investigator (PI) has demonstrated how to exploit noisy feedback by shifting to an error-and-erasures perspective, utilizing identification codes on the reverse link, and making novel use of unequal error protection. The result is a massive reduction in bit-error rate and delay. This project will address new scenarios (e.g., wireless fading, multiuser networks, interaction with queuing) to develop architectural insights, appropriate classes of error correcting codes, and improved network protocols.This work will be incorporated into courses at UW Madison including coding theory, information theory, and the undergraduate course "Introduction to Society?s Engineering Grand Challenges". The PI and his research team are also involved in high-school STEM outreach through the UW Engineering Summer Program. Translation to practice will be hastened through the PI?s existing industrial collaborations.