"These results have a high practical value" with Tobias Oechtering
Results in multi-user information theory provide fundamental limits of complex communication systems, which a system in reality cannot beat. Although these results are based on theoretical models, these results have a high practical value since they show where the practically achieved performance in an ICT system cannot be improved further or point on promising directions for improvement.
The constructive proof techniques also provide valuable hints how to realize the potential gains. Multi-user systems inherently consider setups with multiple terminals, where the goal is to design cooperative strategies such that the overall ICT system performance is optimized.
With the support of the SRA funding the research activity in the area of cooperative communication has been substantially intensified at the Electrical Engineering school at KTH. The success is based on the interplay of newly established research and teaching activities. The research activity has led to several research results accepted and published in most prominent journals and conferences in the fields of information theoretic source and channel coding, networked control, as well as distributed detection always considering multiple terminals. The research has often been done in international collaboration with excellent research partners and allowed involved graduate students to visit those excellent researchers at top schools such as Stanford, Univ. of Urbana Champaign, or Queens University for several months during their PhD studies. The research activities have been substantially strengthened by the newly established graduate courses. In particular, we biannually teach a specialized graduate course on multi-user information theory since 2010 and a course which includes the fundamentals of distributed detection since 2012. These courses have been recently complemented by a specialized graduate course on information theoretic security, a critical aspect which should be included in the cooperative design of future ICT systems. The initially SRA funded activity has been recently co-funded by several sources. In particular, the exploitation of the practical value of such results is subject in a collaborative industry project and to deepen the understanding of the impact of receiver side information is subject of theoretical studies supported by a young researcher grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR).