Wireless network information flow: a deterministic approach
Salman Avestimehr
Center for the Mathematics of Information
California Institute of Technology

Abstract:
Claude Shannon invented information theory in 1948 and it forms the
basis for the design of all modern day communication systems. His
original theory was primarily point-to-point, quantifying information
and studying how fast it can flow across an isolated noisy
communication channel. Until recently, there has been only limited
success in extending the theory to a network of interacting
nodes. Progress has been made in the past decade, driven both by
engineering interest in wireless networks as well as conceptual
advances such as network coding, which shows the surprising result that
even in noiseless wireline networks, coding across packets can improve
throughput beyond pure store-and-forward routing.

This talk is a fresh perspective on the state-of-the-art of the
field. Our strategy is to use analytically simpler discrete
deterministic network models to capture the interaction between nodes
and as an approximation to more complex noisy network models. We start
with  the classical wireline network and progress to more complex models 
for wireless networks and hope to answer questions such as

* What is the optimal way for relay nodes to cooperate and send
information?

* How can information flow over a network be quantified and
visualized?