Network information theory for classical-quantum channels

Network information theory is the study of communication problems involving multiple senders, multiple receivers and intermediate relay stations. The purpose of this thesis is to extend the main ideas of classical network information theory to the study of classical-quantum channels. We prove coding theorems for the following communication problems: quantum multiple access channels, quantum interference channels, quantum broadcast channels and quantum relay channels. A quantum model for a communication channel describes more accurately the channel’s ability to transmit information. By using physically faithful models for the channel outputs and the detection procedure, we obtain better communication rates than would be possible using a classical strategy. In this thesis, we are interested in the transmission of classical information, so we restrict our attention to the study of classical-quantum channels. These are channels with classical inputs and quantum outputs, and so the coding theorems we present will use classical encoding and quantum decoding. We study the asymptotic regime where many copies of the channel are used in parallel, and the uses are assumed to be independent. In this context, we can exploit information-theoretic techniques to calculate the maximum rates for error-free communication for any channel, given the statistics of the noise on that channel. These theoretical bounds can be used as a benchmark to evaluate the rates achieved by practical communication protocols. Most of the results in this thesis consider classical-quantum channels with finite dimensional output systems, which are analogous to classical discrete memoryless channels. In the last chapter, we will show some applications of our results to a practical optical communication scenario, in which the information is encoded in continuous quantum degrees of freedom, which are analogous to classical channels with Gaussian noise.