Introduction to the Special Issue on Networking and ... - CiteSeerX

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOL. 52, NO. 6, JUNE 2006

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Introduction to the Special Issue on Networking and Information Theory

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ETWORKING and information theory have long promised interesting connections. Yet, for many years the most fruitful exchange between these two fields lay in the researchers who worked in both areas or migrated from one to the other. The research itself witnessed less cross fertilization. On the one hand, information theory began with basic models and fundamental questions. On the other hand, the reality of networking turned to increasingly complex networks. In the early days, Ford and Fulkerson, as well as Elias, Feinstein, and Shannon, attacked and solved the same network related problem at the same time in different publications. But as progress on multiterminal information theory slowed and networking tackled more and more complex problems, the gap between these sister disciplines seemed to grow ever wider. The result was succinctly summarized in the survey article by Ephremides and Hajek, “Information Theory and Communications Networks: An Unconsummated Union” [1]. Still, networking and information theory always showed a strong connection, and exciting recent developments point to a new world of especially fruitful common ground between these two areas. On the networking side, the complexity of physicallayer issues, particularly in wireless networks, has prompted an interlayer approach that fits well in the context of information theory. On the information-theoretic side, classical approaches to multiuser information theory have been enhanced by an active interest in casting practical networking problems in an information-theoretic setting. In particular, developments in information theory have drastically changed the angle of attack on information-theoretic problems of networking. Examples of such intersection areas are scaling laws in networks, network coding, implementation and theory of multiuser systems, wireless network design involving multiple-input multiple-output channels, data dissemination algorithms, a network utility maximization framework which quantifies end-user application utilities realized by physical-layer innovations, and queuing and delay issues in information-theoretic capacity settings. This Special Issue reflects these areas in a reasonably equitable fashion. While the custom of previous special issues of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY was to give a short description of each paper, we forego that tradition here. Clearly, this issue is quite large already. Nevertheless, we would like to comment on the broad areas in this issue. About a quarter

of all accepted papers shows a focus on network coding. We believe this is a reflection of the effects that network coding has had, particularly on the information theory community. On the networking side, an important and integrative role is being played by sensor networks, scaling laws, and other fundamental questions that try to characterize properties of the rate regions rather than the rate regions themselves. Not surprisingly, the second largest group of papers deals with such questions relating to throughput limits in noisy networks. Together, these two groups make up half of the papers in this special issue. The remaining papers fall roughly into four different areas: data gathering and dissemination, network operations, network applications, and timing and queuing issues. As Guest Editors we would like to thank all those who submitted manuscripts to this Special Issue. We also thank our many careful, diligent, and timely referees. We received many more good papers than could be accommodated in this issue and we had to make a number of difficult choices. We hope and trust that the reader will share our excitement over this Special Issue. While the union between networking and information theory is still not fully consummated, the two fields do seem to be dating now. We hope that this Special Issue will be considered a successful “date” between the communities and the readership of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY and the IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING. NING CAI MUNG CHIANG MICHELLE EFFROS RALF KOETTER MURIEL MÉDARD BALAJI PRABHAKAR R. SRIKANT DON TOWSLEY RAYMOND W. YEUNG Guest Editors REFERENCES

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIT.2006.874965

[1] B. Hajek and A. Ephremides, “Information theory and communications networks: An unconsummated union,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 2416–2434, Oct. 1998. 0018-9448/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE

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Ning Cai received the B.S. degree in mathematics from the Normal College of Beijing, Beijing, China, in 1982, the M.S. degree in mathematics from Academia Sinica, Beijing, in 1984, and the Dr. degree in mathematics from the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, in 1988. During 1984–1986, he worked in the Institute of Systems Sciences, Academia Sinica. During 1988–1989, he was with the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, the University of Illinois, Chicago. From 1989 to 1998, he was a Wiss. Mitarbeiter in the Department of Mathematics, the University of Bielefeld, and from 1998 to 1999, he was with the School of Computing, the National University of Singapore. From 2000 to 2001, he was with the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. From 2002 to 2004 he was with the Department of Mathematics, the University of Bielefeld. Currently, he is visiting the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include combinatorics, information theory, coding theory and their applications.

Mung Chiang (S’00–M’03) received the B.S. (Honors) degree in electrical engineering and mathematics as well as the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. He conducts research in the areas of nonlinear optimization of communication networks, architectures, and algorithms in broadband access networks, and information-theoretic limits of data transmission and compression. Prof. Chiang is the Lead Guest Editor of the Special Issue of IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS on “Nonlinear Optimization of Communication Systems,” and the Program Co-Chair of the 38th Conference on Information Sciences and Systems in 2004. He has been awarded the Hertz Foundation Fellowship and received the Stanford University School of Engineering Terman Award, the SBC Communications New Technology Introduction Contribution Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Princeton University Howard B. Wentz Junior Faculty Award.

Michelle Effros (S’93–M’95–SM’03) received the B.S. degree with distinction in 1989, the M.S. degree in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree in 1994, all in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. During the summers of 1988 and 1989 she worked at Hughes Aircraft Company. She joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1994 and is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering. Her research interests include information theory, network coding, data compression, communications, pattern recognition, and image processing. Prof. Effros received Stanford’s Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award (for excellence in engineering) in 1989, the Hughes Masters Full-Study Fellowship in 1989, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 1990, the AT&T Ph.D. Scholarship in 1993, the NSF CAREER Award in 1995, the Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award in 1997, the Richard Feynman-Hughes Fellowship in 1997, an Okawa Research Grant in 2000, and was cited by Technology Review as one of the world’s top 100 young innovators in 2002. She is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and the IEEE Information Theory, Signal Processing, and Communications societies. She served as the Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter from 1995 to 1998 and as a Member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1998 to 2003. She has served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image and Multi-Dimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) Technical Committee since 2001 and is currently Associate Editor for Source Coding for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY.


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Ralf Koetter (S’91–M’96) received the Diploma in electrical engineering degree from the Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. From 1996 to 1997, he was a visiting scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Scientist at CNRS in Sophia Antipolis, France. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and is currently an Associate Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University. His research interests include coding and information theory and their application to communication systems. Prof. Koetter served as Associate Editor for Coding Theory and Techniques for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS from 1999 to 2001. In 2003, he concluded a term as Associate Editor for Coding Theory of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. He received an IBM Invention Achievement Award in 1997, an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, and an IBM Partnership Award in 2001. He is a corecipient of the 2004 Paper Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Since 2003, he has been a Member of the Board of Governers of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Muriel Medard (S’90–M’95–SM’02) received the B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and in mathematics in 1989, the B.S. degree in humanities in 1990, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1991, and the Sc.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Then she was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is now a Harold E. and Esther Edgerton Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and an Associate Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Her research interests are in the areas of network coding and reliable communications, particularly for optical and wireless networks. Prof. Medard serves as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS and as an Associate Editor for Communications for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She will serve as a Technical Program Co-Chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2007. She was awarded the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award in 2002. She was co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the Fourth International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2003). She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2001 and was co-winner of the 2004 MIT Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.

Balaji Prabhakar is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. His professional interests are in algorithms, wireless sensor networks, stochastic network theory, combinarotial optimization, and information theory. He has designed algorithms for switching, routing, bandwidth partitioning, load balancing, and web caching. Currently, he has a strong interest in the practical implementation of network algorithms: he has helped implement algorithms that he has co-developed in commercial router and switch platforms and he is on partial leave from Stanford and at a startup, Nuova Systems. Prof. Prabhakar has been a Terman Fellow at Stanford University and a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has received the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, and the Rollo Davidson Prize awarded to young scientists for their contributions to probability and its applications.

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R. Srikant (S’90–M’91–SM’01–F’06) received the B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1985, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1995. He is currently with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. His research interests include communication networks, stochastic processes, queueing theory, information theory, and game theory. Prof. Srikant was an Associate Editor of Automatica and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, and is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING. He has also served on the editorial boards of special issues of the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY. He was the Chair of the 2002 IEEE Computer Communications Workshop in Santa Fe, NM and will be a program Co-Chair of IEEE INFOCOM, 2007.

Don Towsley received the B.A. degree in physics (1971) and the Ph.D. degree in computer science (1975) from the University of Texas, Arlington. From 1976 to 1985, he was a member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Department of Computer Science. He has held visiting positions at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY; Laboratoire MASI, Paris, France; INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France; AT&T Labs.–Research, Florham Park, NJ; and Microsoft Research Lab., Cambridge, U.K. His research interests include networks and performance evaluation. Prof. Towsley currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the ACM and IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, and has previously served on numerous other editorial boards. He was Program Co-Chair of the joint ACM SIGMETRICS and PERFORMANCE’92 Conference and the Performance 2002 Conference. He is a member of ACM and ORSA, Chair of IFIP Working Group 7.3, and cofounder and Chair of the Computer Performance Foundation. He has received the 1998 IEEE Communications Society William Bennett Best Paper Award and numerous best conference/workshop paper awards. Finally, he has been elected Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.

Raymond W. Yeung (S’85–M’88–SM’92–F’03) was born in Hong Kong on June 3, 1962. He received the B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively. He was on leave at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, France, during fall 1986. He was a Member of Technical Staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1988 to 1991. Since 1991, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he is now a Chair Professor and Director of the Internet Engineering Program. He is the author of the textbook A First Course in Information Theory (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2002). He has held visiting positions at Cornell University, Nankai University, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Copenhagen, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Munich University of Technology. His research interests include information theory and network coding. He has been a Consultant in a project of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, for salvaging the malfunctioning Galileo Spacecraft and a Consultant for NEC, USA. Dr. Yeung was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1999 to 2001. He has served on the committees of a number of information theory symposia and workshops. He was the General Chair of the First Workshop on Network, Coding, and Applications (NetCod 2005), and he will be a Technical Co-Chair for the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory to be held in Seattle, WA. He currently serves as an Editor-at-Large for Communications in Information and Systems, an Editor of Foundation and Trends in Communications and Information Theory and of Foundation and Trends in Networking, and an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of this TRANSACTIONS. He was a recipient of the Croucher Award for 2000/2001, the Best Paper Award (Communication Theory) of the 2004 International Conference on Communications, Circuits and System (with C. K. Ngai), and the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (for his paper “Linear network coding” coauthored with S.-Y. R. Li and N. Cai). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.