Mathematics of Communications

Our Research

Modern society depends crucially on the ability to store and transmit large amounts of digital information at high speed. Satellite communication, movies on demand, portable music players, flash drives, and cellphones all rely on the mathematical theory of coding to ensure that the original images, speech, music, or data can be recovered perfectly, even if mistakes are introduced during storage or transmission.

Emerging communications technologies often have their own unique combination of physical constraints, leading to new mathematical questions and opportunities. The mathematical structures associated with these communications technologies include shift register sequences, finite fields, linear codes, incidence structures, combinatorial designs, and finite geometries.

The SFU Mathematics of Communications research group combines combinatorial, analytical and computational techniques to attack outstanding practical and theoretical problems of digital communications. Some of our specific areas of interest are:

• correlation properties of sequences and arrays
• cryptography
• coding theory
• quantum information theory
• combinatorial design theory