CPCC Seminar: Toward a Many-User Information Theory

Dongning Guo, Ph.D.

Classical multiuser information theory studies the fundamental limits of models with a fixed (often small) number of users as the coding blocklength goes to infinity. In this talk, Guo will introduce a new regime, where the number of users and the blocklength tend to infinity simultaneously. This paradigm is motivated by systems in which the number of devices is comparable or far exceeds the blocklength, such as in large machine-to-machine communication systems and sensor networks. The focus is on the Gaussian many-access channel, which consists of a single receiver and a massive number of transmitters, where a subset of users transmit in a given block and need to be identified. Since the conventional notion of capacity in bits-per-channel use is ill-suited for the task, a new notion of capacity is introduced and characterized. Also discussed are many-broadcast channels, lossless many-source coding, and an outlook on a general many-user information theory. Parts of the work were conducted in collaboration with Xu Chen and Tsung-Yi Chen at Northwestern University and with Gregory W. Wornell at MIT.



BIO:  Dongning Guo joined the faculty of Northwestern University, Evanston in 2004, where he is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received the B.Eng. degree from the University of Science & Technology of China, the M.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore, and master’s degree and doctorate from Princeton University. He was an R&D Engineer in the Center for Wireless Communications, Singapore, from 1998 to 1999. He has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, an editor of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, and a guest editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He received the Huber and Suhner Best Student Paper Award in the International Zurich Seminar on Broadband Communications in 2000 and is a co-recipient of the 2010 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. He is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. He is currently on sabbatical leave visiting MIT. His research interests are in information theory, communications, networking and signal processing.