As telecommunication networks become more complex, the demands for capacity and data compression become more severe. This research is set up to develop a general theory of information flow in networks. The networks will have arbitrary interference among the transmitters and receivers, and arbitrary noise at the receivers. Such a theory would encompass hybrid communication networks consisting of fiber optics, wire and electromagnetic media. The primary attack will be to use Shannon-sense information theory, thus providing the best achievable limits for distributed capacity and distributed data compression. Specific problems include progressive transmission, the sequential refinement of information and the determination of the capacity region of broadcast channels and multiple user channels, both with and without feedback. Also to be considered is the general question of the efficient distribution of information; thus providing guidance to problems in network information theory may lead to useful heuristics for suboptimal data communication procedures when the optimal procedure is judged to be practically unachievable for reasons of cost or computation time.//
