Video Aware Wireless Networks

Speaker: Dr. Jeff Foerster

Faculty Host: Professor Shivendra Panwar

Abstract
Wireless networks are being overloaded with traffic driven by smart phones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, and many other connected devices including cars and machines in M2M applications.  Much of this traffic is expected to be video, including not just entertainment video-on-demand services, but also interactive video conferencing, social networking, and other video sharing applications.  In order to deliver better quality video over wireless networks in the most efficient way, we need to drive greater intelligence into multiple points in the end-to-end solution, including improved video quality monitoring at the devices, joint source-channel coding, more efficient transport protocols and error recovery mechanisms, and adaptive end-to-end algorithms which can predict and dynamically adapt to the changing wireless environment.  Although some of these topics have been in the academic world for decades, we’re starting to see some of the ideas being thought about and realized in industry driven by the need to more efficiently utilize the limited wireless resources that exist to support the pending deluge of data and video content in the future.  This talk will give a brief overview of some of the trends that are driving wireless research at Intel, provide some motivation for optimizing the end-to-end delivery of video for future wireless networks, and present some recent results on distortion-aware resource allocation, joint source-channel coding for WiMax and LTE systems, and scalable video coding techniques and optimizations.

About the Speaker
Jeff Foerster is currently a Principal Engineer in the Wireless Communications Lab in Intel Labs and a Senior Member of the IEEE.  He currently leads a team focused on Wireless Multimedia Solutions, which includes topics on joint source-channel coding, adaptive compression, and end-to-end video network optimizations.  His past research has included Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology and related regulations, 60 GHz system design, and wireless displays. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Diego, where his thesis focused on adaptive interference suppression and coding techniques for CDMA systems.