Abstract
Wireless ad-hoc networks enable many new and exciting applications, including entertainment networks, sensor networks, smart homes and buildings, and automated highways and factories. These systems will have enormous variation in their device capabilities, network requirements, and application demands, giving rise to significant wireless network design challenges. Many of these challenges can be effectively addressed through a cross-layer design of the network protocol stack. In particular, techniques for multiplexing to provide high data rates, diversity to insure robustness, and responsiveness to system dynamics extend across multiple layers of the network protocol stack. Thus, the tradeoffs inherent to these techniques must be optimized across protocol layers. Moreover, these techniques can be enhanced by allowing network nodes to cooperate in signal transmission and reception. In this talk we discuss exploiting these techniques and optimizing their inherent tradeoffs in three specific wireless applications: video transmission, energy-constrained sensor networks, and distributed control. Performance results for each application will be presented that demonstrate significant improvements through cross-layer design.
Biography
Andrea Goldsmith received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from U.C. Berkeley in 1986, 1991, and 1994, respectively. She is currently an associate professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, and was previously an assistant professor at Caltech. She has also held positions at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Maxim Technologies. Her research includes work in capacity of wireless channels and networks, energy-constrained wireless communications, wireless communications for distributed control, and cross-layer design of wireless networks.
Dr. Goldsmith is a Fellow of the IEEE, holds the Bredt Faculty Development Scholar Chair at Stanford, and is the recipient of several awards including the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lectureship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the David Griep Memorial Prize from U.C. Berkeley. She is an elected member of Stanford’s Faculty Senate and the Board of Governers for the IEEE Information Theory Society, and also serves as Vice-Chair for the Communication Theory Committee of the IEEE Communications Society.
