Cores of cooperative games are ubiquitous in information theory, and arise
most frequently in the characterization of fundamental limits in various
scenarios involving multiple users. Examples include classical settings in
network information theory such as Slepian-Wolf source coding and multiple
access channels, classical settings in statistics such as robust hypothesis
testing, and new settings at the intersection of networking and statistics such
as distributed estimation problems for sensor networks. Cooperative game theory
allows one to understand aspects of all of these problems from a fresh and
unifying perspective that treats users as players in a game, sometimes leading
to new insights. At the heart of these analyses are fundamental dualities that
have been long studied in the context of cooperative games; for information
theoretic purposes, these are dualities between information inequalities on the
one hand and properties of rate, capacity or other resource allocation regions
on the other.Comment: 12 pages, published at
http://www.hindawi.com/GetArticle.aspx?doi=10.1155/2008/318704 in EURASIP
Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Special Issue on "Theory
and Applications in Multiuser/Multiterminal Communications", April 200