Associate Professor Lawrence Ong

A source coding problem over a noiseless broadcast channel where the source is preinformed about the contents of the cache of all receivers, is an index coding problem. Furthermore, if each message is requested by one receiver, then we call this an index coding problem with a unicast message setting. This problem can be represented by a directed graph. In this paper, we first define a structure (we call generalized interlinked cycle (GIC)) in directed graphs. A GIC consists of cycles which are interlinked in some manner (i.e., not disjoint), and it turns out that the GIC is a generalization of cliques and cycles. We then propose a simple scalar linear encoding scheme with linear time encoding complexity. This scheme exploits GICs in the digraph. We prove that our scheme is optimal for a class of digraphs with message packets of any length. Moreover, we show that our scheme can outperform existing techniques, e.g., partial clique cover, local chromatic number, composite-coding, and interlinked cycle cover.

We study the index coding problem in the unicast message setting, i.e., where each message is requested by one unique receiver. This problem can be modeled by a directed graph. We propose a new scheme called interlinked cycle cover, which exploits interlinked cycles in the directed graph, for designing index codes. This new scheme generalizes the existing clique cover and cycle cover schemes. We prove that for a class of infinitely many digraphs with messages of any length, interlinked cycle cover provides an optimal index code. Furthermore, the index code is linear with linear time encoding complexity.

We study the half-duplex Gaussian two-way relay channel with direct user-to-user links. In this setup, two users exchange data via a relay and via direct user-to-user links. Due to the half-duplex constraint, the channel can be in one of eight different states at any time (two of which are useless: no node transmitting and no node listening). Restricting to only four states, we propose a scheme that utilizes lattice codes to improve upon existing four-state schemes. Using all six states, we propose another scheme that utilizes lattice codes and coherent combining, and show that it can outperform existing schemes.

This paper investigates the capacity regions of two-receiver broadcast channels where each receiver (i) has both common and private-message requests, and (ii) knows part of the private message requested by the other receiver as side information. We first propose a transmission scheme and derive an inner bound for the two-receiver memoryless broadcast channel. We next prove that this inner bound is tight for the deterministic channel and the more capable channel, thereby establishing their capacity regions.We show that this inner bound is also tight for all classes of two-receiver broadcast channels whose capacity regions were known prior to this work. Our proposed scheme is consequently a unified capacity-achieving scheme for these classes of broadcast channels.

We consider the multi-way relay channel with common messages and full data exchange, where multiple users exchange correlated messages through a relay. We propose an optimal coding scheme and show that it achieves (i) the capacity region if the uplink is a finite-field channel and the downlink is any arbitrary channel and (ii) the full degrees-of-freedom region if the channel is a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.

This paper considers the finite-field multi-way relay channel with pairwise message sharing, where multiple users exchange messages through a single relay and where the users may share parts of their source messages (meaning that some message parts are known/common to more than one user). In this paper, we design an optimal functional-decode-forward coding scheme that takes the shared messages into account. More specifically, we design an optimal function for the relay to decode (from the users on the uplink) and forward (back to the users on the downlink). We then show that this proposed function-decode-forward coding scheme can achieve the capacity region of the finite-field multi-way relay channel with pairwise message sharing. This paper generalizes our previous result for the case of three users to any number of users. © 2014 IEEE.

This paper investigates the capacity region of three-receiver AWGN broadcast channels where the receivers (i) have private-message requests and (ii) know the messages requested by some other receivers as side information. We classify these channels based on their side information into eight groups, and construct different transmission schemes for the groups. For six groups, we characterize the capacity region, and show that it improves both the best known inner and outer bounds. For the remaining two groups, we improve the best known inner bound by using side information during channel decoding at the receivers. © 2014 IEEE.

In this paper, we investigate achievable rates on the multiple access channel with feedback and correlated sources (MACFCS). The motivation for studying the MACFCS stems from the fact that in a sensor network, sensors collect and transmit correlated data to a common sink. We derive two achievable rate regions for the three-node MACFCS.