The tradeoff between data rate and reliability of reception is a fundamental issue in theory and practice of communication. In this talk, we try to understand the nature of this tradeoff in a slow fading wireless channel. In particular, we will precisely characterize codes that optimally tradeoff these two quantities for every statistical characterization of the wireless channel. This characterization is then used to construct new coding schemes as well as to show optimality of several schemes proposed in the space-time coding literature.

Pramod Viswanath received the PhD degree in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. He was a member of technical staff at Flarion Technologies until August 2001 before joining the ECE department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a recipient of the Eliahu Jury Award from the EECS department of UC Berkeley (2000), the Bernard Friedman Award from the Mathematics department of UC Berkeley (2000), and the NSF CAREER Award (2003).