Abstract

The presence of inexpensive and powerful sensing and communication devices has made it possible to deploy large scale distributed systems for a variety of applications. Interactions among different components of such a system include communication of information and controlling dynamical processes, among others. Thus, it is important to blend ideas from information theory and control theory to address problems at the core of such distributed systems. This dissertation looks at communication scenarios, in which there are feedback channels available for enhancing communication and control performance over noisy forward links. Such feedback can considerably increase the reliability or reduce the complexity of coding schemes that approach capacity. Moreover, transmission schemes with feedback can be used to stabilize unstable plants over communication channels, where a sensor transmits the plant state information to