Elza Erkip

Elza Erkip is an Institute Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. She received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and wireless communications.

Dr. Erkip is a member of the Science Academy of Turkey and is a Fellow of the IEEE. She received the NSF CAREER award in 2001, the IEEE Communications Society WICE Outstanding Achievement Award in 2016, and the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) Technical Achievement Award in 2018. Her paper awards include the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Paper Prize in 2004, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2013 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2019. She was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society 2012-2020, where she was the President in 2018. She was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 2013 to 2014.

Dr. Erkip has had many editorial and conference organization responsibilities. Some recent ones include IEEE International Conference on Communications, Communications Theory Symposium Technical Co-Chair in 2021; IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory Guest Editor in 2021; Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, MIMO Communications and Signal Processing Track Chair in 2017; IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Technical Co-Chair in 2017; IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications Guest Editor in 2015; and IEEE International Symposium of Information Theory General Co-Chair in 2013.

Research Overview:

My research interests include wireless communications, information theory and communication theory. Below are some of my current research projects with links to relevant publications. A chronological list can be found in my publications page.

• Cooperative Communications
• Energy  Efficient Communications
• Joint Source and Channel Coding for Wireless Networks
• Interference in Wireless Networks
• Wireless Physical Layer Security

Cooperative Communications

Wireless communication systems suffer from fading and multipath distortion, as well as interference caused by multiple users operating over a limited bandwidth. Cooperation of users, by enabling wireless terminals to assist each other in transmitting information to their desired destinations, provides a good solution to the problems that current wireless technologies face. At the physical layer, terminals overhear one another’s signals, process and retransmit to form a virtual antenna array. Through cooperation, it is possible to obtain the spatial diversity benefits of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems without necessarily having a physical antenna array at each terminal. Furthermore, unlike MIMO systems, cooperation is able to successfully mitigate shadow fading. Cooperative communication techniques can easily adapt to the changing environment by opportunistically redistributing network resources such as energy and bandwidth. Incorporating the notion of cooperation at the medium access control (MAC) layer extends the benefits to large networks resulting in high throughput, low delay, reduced interference, low transmitted power and extended coverage. Cross-layer design between the application layer and the physical layer enables high quality multimedia transmission over cooperative wireless links.

Our work in this area spans multiple layers of the protocol stack including physical, MAC, networking and application layers. We are interested the theory of cooperative networking (such as information theoretic aspects) as well as implementation (such as a cooperative networking testbed). Our paper “User cooperation-diversity: Part I and II”   won 2004 IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Paper Prize in the Field of Communications Theory, as the best original paper published in IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2003.The paper “User cooperation-diversity: Part I” also won  2013 IEEE Communications Society Advances in Communications Award, as an outstanding paper published in any IEEE Communications Society Publication in the previous 15 calender years. The paper “Diversity-multiplexing tradeoff in half-duplex relay systems” was selected as the best paper of the Communication Theory Symposium of ICC 2007.

This research is partly funded by NSF through grants #0093163, #0430885, #0520054, #0635177, #0708989, #0722868, #0905446 and #1032035

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