How Practical is Network Coding?
Baochun Li, University of Toronto
Friday, January 21

ABSTRACT
In the June 2007 issue of the Scientific American magazine, network
coding has been advertised as an approach that could dramatically and
fundamentally enhance the efficiency and reliability of communication
networks.   In this talk, I will present a retrospective view of
research advances towards practical network coding since 2002, with a
focus on a small number of practical challenges, their corresponding
theoretical solutions, and practical limitations in these theoretical
solutions.  I will discuss highlights of the lessons learned in
the first production deployment of random network coding, where it
has been used in the past four years as the cornerstone of a
large-scale production on-demand streaming system, operated by UUSee
Inc., delivering thousands of on-demand video channels to millions of
unique visitors each month.  I will conclude with an introduction to our
ongoing work on the possible use of network coding in new practical
scenarios.

BIOGRAPHY
Baochun Li received the B.Engr. degree from the Department of Computer Science and
Technology, Tsinghua University, China, in 1995 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees
from the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 1997 and 2000.

Since 2000, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he is currently a Professor. He
holds the Nortel Networks Junior Chair in Network Architecture and Services from
October 2003 to June 2005, and the Bell University Laboratories Endowed Chair in
Computer Engineering since August 2005. His research interests include large-scale
multimedia systems, cloud computing, peer-to-peer networks, applications of
network coding, and wireless networks.

Dr. Li was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham
Award in the Field of Communications Systems in 2000. In 2009, he was a recipient
of the Multimedia Communications Best Paper Award from the IEEE Communications
Society, and a recipient of the University of Toronto McLean Award.  He is a
member of ACM and a senior member of IEEE.