Some Coding and Information Theoretic Problems in Contemporary (Video) Content Delivery

Information and coding theory have traditionally been used in point-to-point scenarios, to compute and achieve the transmission channel capacity as well as to compute and achieve the optimal compression rate vs. source distortion tradeoff. In today's networks, the same (video) data is often transmitted to multiple users, simultaneously over diverse channels. The users may differ not only in the size and resolution of their displays and computing power, but may also be interested in different video scenes, with different levels of distortion, or even with different distortion measures. This paper describes several transmission and compression problems that arise in such heterogeneous network scenarios, and discusses how information and coding theory could be used to address them.