Full Announcement

As announced on April 2, 2009, the Subcommittee for the selection of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joing Paper Award selected the following team including MIT EECS faculty and students Tracey Ho, Prof. Muriel Médard, Prof. David R. Karger, and Ben Leong for their paper titled "A Random Linear Network Coding Approach to Multicast," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 52, no. 10, pp. 4413-4430, October 2006.

The recommendation for this award stated: "This frequently cited paper sets out a distributed random linear network coding approach for transmission and compression of information in general multi-source multicast networks. The authors prove that the performance of a network code induced by independent and local linear coding operations achieves, with high probability as the field size grows, the same performance as the best globally designed network code. The authors also demonstrate that random linear coding performs compression when necessary in a network, generalizing error exponents for linear Slepian-Wolf coding in a natural way. The strength of the authors' distributed approach is that no eleaborate scheduling or synchronization method is required; the scheme adapts gracefully to varying network conditions. This paper has had a large impact on applications of network coding: virtually all practical protocols that have been proposed (for example, peer-to-peer systems or wireless networks) use the randomized network coding approach introduced in this paper. This paper, which connects elegant mathematical ideas with practical networking applications, is a superb example of a paper that covers the interests and achieves the values of both the IEEE Communicationis Society and the IEEE Informationi Theory Society.

Congratulations to all authors!