EECS Seminar: Reliable Short-Blocklength Communication with Low Complexity Decoding

Abstract: This talk explores how to effectively transmit and decode the short messages that communicate control information in cellular communications and measurements and status updates from internet-of-things devices.  While there are several techniques that can achieve (and in some cases outperform) the random coding union upper bound on achievable frame error rate, the associated decoders typically have a high average complexity. This talk presents the concatenation of an expurgating linear function with a convolutional code as a technique that can outperform the RCU FER while requiring the average complexity of Viterbi decoding on a relatively small trellis. We will also explore communication of short messages with feedback, presenting new lower bounds on achievable rate for binary symmetric channel and a low complexity posterior-matching algorithm that achieves the lower bound.

Bio: Richard D. Wesel (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1996. He is currently a professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, UCLA, and an associate dean for Academic and Student Affairs for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA. His research interests include communication theory with particular interest in low-density parity-check coding, short-blocklength communication with and without feedback, and coding for storage. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Okawa Foundation Award for research in information theory and telecommunications, and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Samueli School of Engineering. He has served as an associate editor for Coding  for the IEEE Transactions on Communications and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.