Post-Shannon Communication using Identification Codes

The field of information theory was established by Shannon more than 70 years ago and has proven to be an essential mathematical framework for evaluating and optimizing the design of the most complex communication systems up to date. Shannon's transmission scheme focuses on decoding the received information to make it understandable for the recipient, regardless of its content. But what if the latter is not interested in such content, but just in determining whether it addresses him or not? This new paradigm in information theory was first addressed by Ahlswede and Dueck in 1989, who established a new field in its own: the theory of identification. A novel communication scheme such as this one is commonly known as "Post-Shannon Theory of Communication".

Identification theory has predicted two groundbreaking advantages of utmost relevance in the current information age. On one hand,  identification coding theorems have shown that it is possible to have a doubly exponential growth in the number of messages that can be transmitted. And on the other hand, it has been demonstrated that information theoretic security can be integrated in identification scheme at no cost.

We are committed to demonstrate such advantages experimentally in the following fields:

  • Practical realization of identification codes
  • Integration of information theoretic security into identification
  • Common randomness and feedback generation and performance evaluation over various communication channels
  • Simulation of event-based practical scenarios using identification codes
  • Modeling of cryptographic scenarios for common randomness generation
  • System level performance comparison of identification against Shannon's transmission scheme
  • Experimental verification of the potential of multi-user coding schemes in identification and secure identification