Recent developments in communications are driven by the goal of
achieving high data rates for wireless communication devices. To
achieve this goal, several new phenomena need to be investigated
from an information theoretic perspective. In this dissertation,
we focus on three of these phenomena: feedback, relaying and
cooperation. We study these phenomena for various multi-user
channels from an information theoretic point of view.
One of the aims of this dissertation is to study the performance
limits of simple wireless networks, for various forms of feedback
and cooperation. Consider an uplink communication system, where
several users wish to transmit independent data to a base-station.
If the base-station can send feedback to the users, one can expect
to achieve higher data-rates since feedback can enable cooperation
among the users. Another way to improve data-rates is to make use
of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, where the users
can overhear each other's transmitted signals. This particular
phenomenon has garnered much attention lately, where users can
help in increasing each other's data-rates by utilizing the
overheard information. This overheard information can be
interpreted as a generalized form of feedback.
To take these several models of feedback and cooperation into
account, we study the two-user multiple access channel and the
two-user interference channel with generalized feedback. For all
these models, we derive new outer bounds on their capacity
regions. We specialize these results for noiseless feedback,
additive noisy feedback and user-cooperation models and show
strict improvements over the previously known bounds.
Next, we study state-dependent channels with rate-limited state
information to the receiver or to the transmitter. This
state-dependent channel models a practical situation of fading,
where the fade information is partially available to the receiver
or to the transmitter. We derive new bounds on the capacity of
such channels and obtain capacity results for a special sub-class
of such channels.
We study the effect of relaying by considering the parallel relay
network, also known as the diamond channel. The parallel relay
network considered in this dissertation comprises of a cascade of
a general broadcast channel to the relays and an orthogonal
multiple access channel from the relays to the receiver. We
characterize the capacity of the diamond channel, when the
broadcast channel is deterministic. We also study the diamond
channel with partially separated relays, and obtain capacity
results when the broadcast channel is either semi-deterministic or
physically degraded. Our results also demonstrate that feedback to
the relays can strictly increase the capacity of the diamond
channel.
In several sensor network applications, distributed lossless
compression of sources is of considerable interest. The presence
of adversarial nodes makes it important to design compression
schemes which serve the dual purpose of reliable source
transmission to legitimate nodes while minimizing the information
leakage to the adversarial nodes. Taking this constraint into
account, we consider information theoretic secrecy, where our aim
is to limit the information leakage to the eavesdropper. For this
purpose, we study a secure source coding problem with coded side
information from a helper to the legitimate user. We derive the
rate-equivocation region for this problem. We show that the helper
node serves the dual purpose of reducing the source transmission
rate and increasing the uncertainty at the adversarial node. Next,
we considered two different secure source coding models and
provide the corresponding rate-equivocation regions
