Claude E Shannon Communication and Network Group (CNG)

The mission of the Claude E Shannon Communication and Network Group at the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE) is to be an international leader in research, education, and development in the communication and network fields.

The research mission is to address in a rigorous manner the fundamental problems affecting current communication and network systems and to influence the development of future systems. This research will be multi-disciplinary, applying the tools of mathematics, algorithms, system engineering, physics, device technology, and hardware system architectural constructs.

The education mission is to help create tomorrow's academic and industrial leaders in the communication and network fields. The objective is to mentor students not only to help solve deep and fundamental problems from current and future technology, but also to learn the engineering art of identifying important problems and critically assess the main technological challenges.

The development mission is to interact with industry and government at many levels, to ensure the relevance of academic modeling, the professional development of students, the effective transfer of technology and to create an environment in which novel new systems can be created and evaluated.

Finally, the group aims to pursue its research, educational, and development missions in an open, supportive and inclusive research environment. The group will use Claude Shannon's research career as its inspiration for far-reaching fundamental research to build a framework for the technical problems of tomorrow.

Research in the group includes topics on heterogeneous networks and communication systems. The work extends to applications in satellite, wireless and optical communication, and data networks. The objective is to develop the scientific base needed to design data communication networks that are efficient, robust and architecturally clean. Wide-area and local-area networks, high-speed networks, and point-to-point and broadcast communication channels are of concern. Topics of current interest include network architectures at all network layers; power control; multiple antenna techniques; media access control protocols; routing in optical, wireless and satellite networks; quality of service control; failure recovery; topological design; and the use of efficient resource allocation for network connectivity and QoS. An important new research frontier that calls for new modeling, analysis and architecture optimization is the emergence of heterogeneous networks combining fiber, wireless and satellite systems. Heterogeneous networks must provide agile and economical service delivery in the face of challenges that include rapidly changing communication channel quality, link connectivity, and traffic flows. An example of the research frontier is for one internetwork to simultaneously and efficiently support: mobile wireless communication in the presence of fast fading and changing connectivity, microwave satellite communication and free space optical communication affected by rapidly changing atmospheric phenomena, and unscheduled, bursty, large-granularity traffic flows. The problems in this direction are important, rich and very challenging. The theme of heterogeneous networking with performance guarantees is a challenging and important problem for defense and high-end commercial applications. A significant component of our research is the creation of new architectures guided by the understanding of technology and fundamental system limits and the realization and validation of these architectures with hardware and algorithms and system demonstrations. As such, we work closely with industry to extend our research reach and impact beyond the academic boundary.