About the Presenter:

Yao Wang  received the B.S. and M.S. degrees  in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California at Santa Barbara in 1990. Since 1990, she has been with the faculty of Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, and is presently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research areas include video communications, multimedia signal processing, and medical imaging. She is the leading author of a textbook titled Video Processing and Communications, and has published over 150 papers in journals and conference proceedings. She has served as an Associate Editor for  IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and  IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.  She received New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology in the Young Investigator Category in year 2000. She was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2004 for contributions to video processing and communications. She is a co-winner of the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems in 2004.

About the Talk:

Along with the increase in both the bandwidth of wireless networks and computational power of wireless hand-held terminals, various wireless video applications are beginning to emerge. Among these, wireless video multicast is gaining a lot of momentum, since it enables delivery of popular events (such as a soccer game or headline news) to many wireless users in a bandwidth efficient manner. However, providing good and stable video quality to a large number of users with varying channel conditions remains elusive.

Generally, receivers in a multicast coverage area have very different channel qualities. In a conventional design, the sender adjusts its transmission parameters (modulation and error control, etc.) that will yield sufficiently low frame error rate for the worst-case receiver in its coverage area. Thus users with better channel conditions unnecessarily suffer and see worse video than they would have if the system were targeted at good receivers.  We propose to integrate layered video coding with cooperative communication for robust video multicast in infrastructure-based wireless networks. The basic idea is to let the sender targets users with good channel conditions, and then let these users (or a subset) relay their received information to remaining receivers. We consider both omni-directional and directional relay transmission, and formulate user partition along with the transmission time scheduling that can optimize a multicast performance criterion. We show that cooperative communication improves the multicast system performance by providing better quality links to all users and hence higher video quality.

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Note: All MS thesis defense and Ph.D. dissertation (Proposal) defense are counted towards ECE791.