PLENARY IV: On the Sufficiency of Ignorance: Recent Lessons in Network Architecture

With its emphasis on fundamental limits, information theoretic analysis has a long history of providing important architectural insights into the design of efficient communication systems. Frequently, these insights have arisen from uncovering when certain kinds of system constraints do *not* incur a cost in the performance metric of interest. This tradition is alive and well, with many such insights from the community over the past decade or more now influencing the design of several emerging systems. Today, there continues to be much work seeking to uncover additional instances of such phenomena that may prove important in tomorrow's systems. In this talk, I will describe three diverse but representative examples from our own efforts. In particular, I will discuss the problems of parasitic communication, MIMO scheduling, and rateless coding. Based on a variety of joint works in recent years with subsets of Richard Barron, Brian Chen Aaron Cohen, Stark Draper, Uri Erez, Emin Martinian, Urs Niesen, Devavrat Shah, Charles Swannack, Elif Uysal-Biyikoglu, and Mitchell Trott.