Two-way communication, where clients/parties A and B wish to exchange a stream of information, is a natural form of communication of great relevance in present and future wireless networks. Applications include two-way high data-rate tele-medicine, video-conferencing, the synchronization of data among terminals, and communication between a base station and clients. The investigator seeks to establish a fundamental understanding of how best to communicate two-way exchanges of information over networks, of immediate relevance as 1) communication is intrinsically a two-way endeavor but has mainly been treated as two one-way links, 2) new techniques have led to significant progress towards the elusive capacity of a network, and 3) recent results have shown that techniques which exploit the two-way nature of the data can outperform and differ markedly from straightforward extensions of one-way methods to two-way communications. The research will be integrated with practice and education through partnering with Motorola, existing UIC Women in Science outreach programs, and the investigator-led UIC Software-Defined Radio Lab.
The intellectual merit lies in the development of novel theoretical foundations able to explain, predict and analyze optimal two-way communication strategies over wireless networks. The investigator focuses on three integrated thrusts: 1) the introduction of a framework for two-way communications to understand two-way networks with and without relays under different channel models and assumptions on two-way adaptability, 2) the derivation of exact, and alternative performance guaranteeing capacity characterizations for increasingly complex subsets of the two-way framework, and 3) the determination of when separation is optimal and derivation of joint source-channel rate distortion regions for the transmission of correlated sources over noisy two-way networks.
