Streaming Codes for Low-Latency Communication

Ensuring reliable communication with low latency, is key to next-generation applications such as interactive voice and video, multiplayer gaming, multiplayer virtual reality and telesurgery.   Not surprisingly, ultra-reliable low-latency communication is one of three focus areas of 5G cellular systems.

Our group has recently come up with a class of low-complexity, packet-level forward error-correction codes, termed as streaming codes.  These codes maximize the rate of information transmission while maintaining robustness against a large class of packet-erasure patterns, under a stringent decoding-delay constraint.  The packet erasures could arise for example, from dropped packets due to congestion in the network, or packets that are lost on account of a wireless link that is experiencing a deep fade. Our work has received recognition in the form of a paper [2] that was one of four finalists for the 2019 IEEE Jack Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.  It was also awarded a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2019, India [3].

References:

[1] M. N. Krishnan and P. V. Kumar, “Rate-Optimal Streaming Codes for Channels with Burst and Isolated Erasures,” in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2018, pp. 1809–1813.

[2] M. N. Krishnan, D. Shukla and P. V. Kumar, “A Quadratic Field-Size Rate-Optimal Streaming Code for Channels with Burst and Random Erasures,” in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2019, pp. 852–856 (finalist for the IEEE Jack Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award).

[3] M. Vajha, M. N. Krishnan and P. V. Kumar, “Streaming Codes for Low-Latency Communication”, Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, 2019, India.

Website: https://eecs.iisc.ac.in/people/vijay-kumar-p/