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Research

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Research Areas

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Network, Communication and Information Systems Research

Network, Communication and Information Systems Research

Network, Communication & Information Systems (NCIS)

Related Courses

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See a full list of graduate-level ECE courses related to this area (click the CM column to see Major area courses)

The field of communication involves the transmission of information from one place to another place or storing information for later retrieval. A communication system is a pair of stations – a transmitter station and a receiver station. Communication networks are collections of receiving and transmitting stations that may relay information from one station to another by means of other stations acting as relays. There are many components in the process of transmitting information in a communication system. One component is information representation in minimal form, that is data compression. A second aspect of communication is modulation; the process whereby information is mapped into waveforms suitable for propagation. A third aspect is error control coding; the method by which errors made in receiving information can be corrected. The performance of a communication system is usually measured in terms of the probability of incorrectly decoding the information or the distortion between the original information-bearing signal and the reconstruction, and the energy used. In communication networks there are many components needed in the processing of sending information from one station to another via a set of intermediate stations. One aspect is medium access control – meaning which stations should transmit and when. Another aspect of communication networks is routing – meaning which set of stations should be used as relays in communicating information from one station to another station. The performance measures in communication networks are the network throughput (correctly decoded packets end-to-end) along with the energy consumed. 

Communications research at U-M is investigating the fundamental limits of performance possible in communication systems and communication networks and the practical methods of achieving close to the fundamental limits. The applications that are of interest include cellular communication networks, sensor networks, and optical communication systems.

Specialties

• Communication theory, Coding theory & practice (Anastasopoulos, Kim, Mahdavifar, Pradhan, Stark)
  • Communications: Wireless, mobile, spread-spectrum communications
  • Coding & Modulation: Channel coding, Polar codes, Algebraic coding, Modulation, Receiver design
• Information theory (Pradhan, Anastasopoulos, Stark, Mahdavifar)
  • Source coding: Lossy and lossless source coding, Quantization, Distributed compression
  • Image compression: Image compression & processing
  • Information theory: Multi-user information theory, Secrecy capacity, Function computation
  • Quantum Information theory: Quantum information science and engineering, Quantum information theory
• Networks (Anastasopoulos, Liu, Pradhan, Stark, Subramanian, Ying)
  • Performance analysis: Stochastic scheduling and resource allocation, Communication networks, Cloud computing systems
  • Telecommunication networks: Mobile/wireless/ad hoc/sensor/broadband satellite networks
  • Control: Stochastic control, Decentralized stochastic systems, Discrete event systems, Smart grid
  • Economics: Mathematical economics, Game theory, Energy markets, Spectrum markets, Network economics, Bayesian learning
  • Social networks: Social network analysis, Recommender systems, Crowdsourcing, Random graphs
  • Security: Cybersecurity, Privacy
• Data Science (Liu, Subramanian, Ying)
  • Machine learning: Social network analysis, Recommender systems, Crowdsourcing, Graph analysis
  • Security: Privacy, Cybersecurity
  • Optimization: Distributed optimization, Computation-Information-Performance trade-offs

ECE Faculty

Achilleas Anastasopoulos

Website

Jiasi Chen

Website

Parag Deotare

Website

Aline Eid

Website

Brian Gilchrist

Website

Alfred Hero

Website

Mohammed Islam

Website

Hun-Seok Kim

Website

Jaechan Lim

Website

Mingyan Liu

Website

Hessam Mahdavifar

Website

S. Sandeep Pradhan

Website

Wayne Stark

Website

Vijay Subramanian

Website

Lei Ying

Website

Zheshen Zhang

Website

CSE Faculty

Mahdi Cheraghchi

Website

Ronald Dreslinski

Website