2009 Research Summary

Communication for Control

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Anant Sahai, Se Yong Park and Pulkit Grover

National Science Foundation CCF-729122

Traditional information theory deals with communicating noninteractive messages, yet many real-world applications are inherently interactive in nature. Control theory provides us with models of interaction and it is natural to treat certain distributed control problems as having a communication problem embedded in them. Extending information theory to cover such cases gives us new insights into reliable communication, feedback, and interaction.

Recently, we have used this to get new insights into the long-standing Witsenhausen counterexample in distributed control--by showing how it is intimately related to a family of seemingly unrelated information-theoretic problems.