Information Theory and Network Coding (eBook)

This book contains a thorough discussion of the classical topics in information theory together with the first comprehensive treatment of network coding, a subject first emerged under information theory in the mid 1990's that has now diffused into coding theory, computer networks, wireless communications, complexity theory, cryptography, graph theory, etc. With a large number of examples, illustrations, and original problems, this book is excellent as a textbook or reference book for a senior or graduate level course on the subject, as well as a reference for researchers in related fields.

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This book is an evolution from my book A First Course in Information Theory published in 2002 when network coding was still at its infancy. The last few years have witnessed the rapid development of network coding into a research ?eld of its own in information science. With its root in infor- tion theory, network coding has not only brought about a paradigm shift in network communications at large, but also had signi?cant in?uence on such speci?c research ?elds as coding theory, networking, switching, wireless c- munications,distributeddatastorage,cryptography,andoptimizationtheory. While new applications of network coding keep emerging, the fundamental - sults that lay the foundation of the subject are more or less mature. One of the main goals of this book therefore is to present these results in a unifying and coherent manner. While the previous book focused only on information theory for discrete random variables, the current book contains two new chapters on information theory for continuous random variables, namely the chapter on di?erential entropy and the chapter on continuous-valued channels. With these topics included, the book becomes more comprehensive and is more suitable to be used as a textbook for a course in an electrical engineering department.