English

Coordination Capacity

Information Theory 2011-04-04 v2 math.IT

Abstract

We develop elements of a theory of cooperation and coordination in networks. Rather than considering a communication network as a means of distributing information, or of reconstructing random processes at remote nodes, we ask what dependence can be established among the nodes given the communication constraints. Specifically, in a network with communication rates {R_{i,j}} between the nodes, we ask what is the set of all achievable joint distributions p(x1, ..., xm) of actions at the nodes of the network. Several networks are solved, including arbitrarily large cascade networks. Distributed cooperation can be the solution to many problems such as distributed games, distributed control, and establishing mutual information bounds on the influence of one part of a physical system on another.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0909.2408,
  title  = {Coordination Capacity},
  author = {Paul Cuff and Haim Permuter and Thomas Cover},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.2408},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

Accepted to IEEE Trans. on Info. Theory, 25 pages, 23 eps figure, uses IEEEtran.cls

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:45:51.247Z