CAREER: Breaking the Barriers in Wireless Network Information Theory: A Deterministic Approach

香农的代表作《通信的数学理论》(1948)是传播史上最有影响力的著作之一。在这项开创性的工作中，香农描述了点对点通道上可靠通信的基本限制，并提供了实现它的体系结构系统设计。将这一理论扩展到网络环境是过去几十年来信息论面临的最大挑战之一。这一领域的进展有望在未来分布式无线网络的设计方面产生重大突破，例如ad-hoc网络。到目前为止，大多数研究工作都使用与Shannon用于点对点信道相同的一般性和准确性来解决这个问题。然而，要达到这样的标准已经被证明是极其困难的，以至于大多数基本网络的容量仍然未知。本研究克服了以往工作的局限性，提出了一种新的方法，其基础是将焦点改变为寻求近似解，并伴随着对缺口到最优的保证。这种方法的核心是开发简单、确定的信道模型，该模型捕捉无线介质的主要特征，并用于近似更复杂的模型。基于PI的最新结果，该工作开发了一个统一的框架来利用这一强大的方法来1)近似无线网络的容量；2)研究不完全网络知识对容量的影响；3)设计对攻击者具有健壮性的协议；4)利用最新的物理层编码技术进行跨层协议设计。该项目还包括通过提供教程和组织讲习班的形式，向妇女和代表性不足的少数群体提供重要的外联方案。

Shannon's masterpiece, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), is one of the most influential works in the history of communications. In this seminal work, Shannon characterized the fundamental limit for reliable communication over point-to-point channels and provided the architectural system design for achieving it. Extending this theory to network setting has been one of the greatest challenges in information theory over the past few decades. Progress in this area is expected to produce significant breakthrough in the design of distributed wireless networks of the future, such as ad-hoc networks. So far, most research efforts have approached this problem using the same generality and accuracy used by Shannon for point-to-point channels. However, meeting such a standard has proven to be extremely difficult, to the extent that the capacity of most basic networks is still unknown.This research overcomes the limitations of prior work by presenting a new approach, which is based on changing the focus to seek approximate solutions accompanied by guarantees on the gap to optimality. At the heart of this approach is the development of simple, deterministic channel models that capture the main features of the wireless medium, and are utilized to approximate more complex models. Building on recent results of the PI, the work develops a unified framework to utilize this powerful approach to 1) approximate the capacity of wireless networks; 2) study the impact of incomplete network knowledge on the capacity; 3) design protocols that are robust against adversaries; and 4) utilize recent physical layer coding techniques for cross-layer protocol design. The project also includes significant outreach program to women and under-represented minorities in the form of presenting tutorials and organizing workshops.