Devoted to information security, this volume begins with a short course on cryptography, mainly based on lectures given by Rudolf Ahlswede at the University of Bielefeld in the mid 1990s. It was the second of his cycle of lectures on information theory which opened with an introductory course on basic coding theorems, as covered in Volume 1 of this series. In this third volume, Shannon's historical work on secrecy systems is detailed, followed by an introduction to an information-theoretic model of wiretap channels, and such important concepts as homophonic coding and authentication. Once...

The calculation of channel capacities was one of Rudolf Ahlswede's specialties and is the main topic of this second volume of his Lectures on Information Theory. Here we find a detailed account of some very classical material from the early days of Information Theory, including developments from the USA, Russia, Hungary and (which Ahlswede was probably in a unique position to describe) the German school centered around his supervisor Konrad Jacobs. These lectures made an approach to a rigorous justification of the foundations of Information Theory. This is the second of several volumes...

The fourth volume of Rudolf Ahlswede's lectures on Information Theory is focused on Combinatorics. Ahlswede was originally motivated to study combinatorial aspects of Information Theory via zero-error codes: in this case the structure of the coding problems usually drastically changes from probabilistic to combinatorial. The best example is Shannon's zero error capacity, where independent sets in graphs have to be examined. The extension to multiple access channels leads to the Zarankiewicz problem.

A code can be regarded combinatorially as a hypergraph; and many coding theorems can...

​This book proposes representations of multicast rate regions in wireless networks based on the mathematical concept of submodular functions, e.g., the submodular cut model and the polymatroid broadcast model. These models subsume and generalize the graph and hypergraph models. The submodular structure facilitates a dual decomposition approach to network utility maximization problems, which exploits the greedy algorithm for linear programming on submodular polyhedra. This approach yields computationally efficient characterizations of inner and outer bounds on the multicast capacity...