Mr. HASAN, Mohammad Nur, (3rd year doctoral student in Kurkoski Lab. of Security and Networks Area), received the Student Paper Award in the 2018 International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA 2018).

The International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA) is a leading conference on information theory. Since its inception in 1990, ISITA has been an exciting forum for interdisciplinary interaction, gathering leading researchers to discuss topics of common interest in the field of information theory. In 2018, the biennial ISITA was held October 28-31 in Singapore at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront. ISITA 2018 Student Paper Award is given to four outstanding papers authored by students in the symposium.

Reference:The symposium detail can be found in: http://www.isita.ieice.org/2018/home.html

■Date Awarded
October 30, 2018

■Authors
Mohammad Nur Hasan, Brian M. Kurkoski

■Title
An Efficient Strategy for Applying Compute-and-Forward to the MARC

■Abstract
With the aim of improving network throughput and achieving full diversity gain, this paper focuses on strategies for applying compute-and-forward (CF) scheme to the multiple access relay channel (MARC). The direct application of the original CF to the MARC results in poor error performance due to the probability of a rank deficient coefficient matrix, which is an inherent problem of a CF system. One way to solve this problem is by allowing the relay and the destination to fully cooperate with each other in constructing a full rank coefficient matrix.
However, this requires a large amount of communication overhead. This paper proposes an efficient strategy where the destination always attempts to decode transmitted messages by itself, without the help of the relay. The destination cooperates with the relay only when necessary. It is shown that with a small amount of overhead, the proposed strategy outperforms the existing approaches in terms of achievable sum-rate, outage probability, and throughput. Furthermore, the proposed strategy also achieves the full diversity gain of the MARC.

■Comment
It is a great honor to receive this Student Paper Award of ISITA 2018. I thank ALLAH for everything and for making this award as a part of my achievements. I would like to convey my deepest gratitude to my co-author, who is also my supervisor, Prof. Kurkoski, for his guidance, support, and encouragement. And surely, I am grateful to my lovely family and parents for their full support, love, and pray. I would like also to thank the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation for the important financial support. This award motivates me to achieve more excellent research results in the near future.

November 8, 2018