Communication at the IMA

The 2005 summer program Wireless Communications, June 22–July 1, was designed to meet the challenges posed by the rapid growth in the demand for multimedia wireless services such as voice, data, web-browsing, video, and e-commerce in mobile telephony. This program built on a very successful 2001 Hot Topics workshop on Wireless Networks, and on several activities at the IMA and elsewhere on the mathematical modeling of communication networks.

The organizers have done a wonderful job in putting the program together. In particular, it helped to update what's new in wireless networks and, more importantly, identified research problems that are both useful in industry and challenging in mathematics. The workshop provided a great opportunity for me to meet people in the field I would not meet in regular conferences.

—Qing Zhang

The highly interdisciplinary organizing committee consisted of Prathima Agrawal (Auburn University), Matthew Andrews (Lucent Technologies), Philip J. Fleming (Motorola, Inc.), George Yin (Wayne State University), and Lisa Zhang (Lucent Technologies). They brought together a unique and spectacularly diverse group of researchers in mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, and operations research, and industrial scientists working on wireless communication.

The program, which consisted of a 3-day tutorial followed by a 5-day workshop, focused on the interplay of the physical, link, and network layers in wireless networks, and therefore involved stochastic calculus, information theory, signal processing, optimization, and control theory. Topics included control and optimization approach to wireless networks, network planning and optimization, air interface scheduling, multihop networks, coding theory for high-speed data over wireless, performance measurement of wireless data networks, information theory of multiple antennas, wireless channel prediction.

I enjoyed the workshop thoroughly. It gave me an appreciation for a field where I had limited prior knowledge. I was looking for connections between my current interests (probability and mathematical physics) and wireless communication. I found these and linked them to specific problems in wireless I would like to work on in the future. What was equally important, it gave me ideas for research that an undergraduate might conduct.

—Dov Chelst