Lernergebnisse
Communication networks are perhaps the most pervasive and ubiquitous infrastructure of our
times. Billions of people around the world access information, make business, share experiences and stay
in touch with each other through the Internet, and in particular using wireless access.
The fundamental science and engineering knowledge that made this astonishing development
possible finds its origin in the seminal paper by Claude E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", published in 1948. This fundamental work represents the birth of the modern
information age. Astonishingly, at a time where the telephone networks was
analog and based on electromechanical circuit switching and radio reduced to analog broadcasting,
Shannon deployed the fundamental concepts of information measures (Entropy, Mutual Information)
and their operational significance as the fundamental limits of data compression (how many
bits of information are necessary to compress an information source without any loss?), channel
coding (how many bits of information per unit time can be sent through a communication channel
such that the message is recovered by the receiver with arbitrarily low error probability?) and
source coding (how many bits of information are necessary to represent an information source such
that its can be reconstructed within a desired fidelity level?).
Since Shannon's work, the field of modern digital communications, channel coding, data networks,
source coding and wireless/cellular communications has developed enormously. Very large
and successful companies, such as Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel Lucent, Siemens, Huawei,
Broadcom, Intel, Samsung, have been setting the technology trends, and standards such as TCP/IP,
IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.16, GSM, IS-95, and the more recent 3GPP family of standards (e.g.,
LTE/LTE-A) enable ubiquitous connectivity and the merging of a variety of communication networks
onto a common interconnected platform. Perhaps the most striking fact is that Shannon's
theoretical conclusions, that information is essentially "discrete" (i.e., digital) and that any source
can be reduced to a common currency (bits), such bits can be exchanged reliably through a network
which is somehow source-agnostic, and reconstructed at the end users within a near-optimal fidelity
level, has become a fact of everyday's life, that we all enjoy and experience. Today, we use the
Internet, most of the times supported by a wireless access network, to consume a wealth of different
sources (audio, speech, video, data, images, text) that in the not-so-distant past required separate
and very different networks (e.g., FM radio, land-line telephone networks, cellular telephone
networks, telegraph/telex, mail/currier delivery, cable TV, UHF/VHF TV, Satellite TV).
The module ``Information Theory and Coding'' provides a comprehensive background on
foundations and specific theoretical knowledge on information theory and channel coding, thus providing the
theoretical background that stays at the basis of modern digital communication networks. Furthermore,
through a rich set of possible elective courses, the students will have the opportunity of
acquiring additional knowledge in specific areas of interest, some of which are advanced theoretical, and others are more applied and practical, according to each student specific orientation and interest.
