InformationTheoryandNetworkCoding(1).pdf

RaymondW.Yeung

InformationTheoryand

NetworkCoding

SPIN Springer's internal project number, if known

May31,2008

Springer

Tomyparentsandmyfamily

Preface

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 information theory,

network coding not only has brought about a paradigm shift in network com-

munications at large, but also has had signicant inuence on such specic

research elds as coding theory, networking, switching, wireless communica-

tions, distributed data storage, cryptography, and optimization theory. While

new applications of network coding keep emerging, the fundamental results

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 dierential

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.

What is in this book

Out of the twenty-one chapters in this book, the rst sixteen chapters

belong to Part I, Components of Information Theory, and the last ve chapters

belong to Part II, Fundamentals of Network Coding. Part I covers the basic

topics in information theory and prepare the reader for the discussions in

Part II. A brief rundown of the chapters will give a better idea of what is in

this book.

Chapter 1 contains a high level introduction to the contents of this book.

First, there is a discussion on the nature of information theory and the main

results in Shannon's original paper in 1948 which founded the eld. There are

also pointers to Shannon's biographies and his works.