RESEARCH PROPOSAL

The proposed title of the thesis will be:

Title: Coordination over networks
Proposal:
In a coordination problem, a group of agents collaborate with each other to produce a set of
desired correlated actions. Such problems arise in several diverse areas such as power
grids, financial markets, perimeter defense scenario, Emergency response management,
Emergency in a Hospital, Manufacturing of a device etc An early work of this kind in
Information theory literature is due to Wyner(1975) who characterized the minimum rate of
common randomness required for two agents to sample(approximately) from the joint
distribution p(x,y) of correlated random variables X,Y; this rate is known as the Wyners
common information of the random variables X,Y. Some later works have focused on how
coordination can be achieved by multiple agents connected by a communication network.
The focus of much of this work has been on the amount of communication needed to
achieve coordination. In practice, several other aspects are also of interest such as, the
amount and form of shared/correlated randomness available, topology of the network used,
the level of coordination desired and security. Depending on the application, the goals may
differ. For instance, at a nuclear power plant, it may be important to build a robust protocols
which can operate even in the presence of active adversaries in the network who may try to
prevent coordination (denial-of-service) or manoeuvre the plant into an unsafe state.
Whereas in a financial market network, where the actions of the players are subject to future
scrutiny, it may be enough to ensure that agents trying to coordinate their actions do not
inadvertently reveal their strategies through their actions and/or communication messages
which can be observed by other agents.
In this thesis, we propose to undertake a systematic study of various aspects and trade-offs
involved in coordination over networks. Broadly, we consider various settings of problems
and characterize the trade-offs with a focus on the other aspects of interest also. The first
problem we plan to study is a generalisation of Wyners common information problem. As in
Wyners original problem, there are two agents who want to produce samples from a desired
joint distribution. A server can send a common message to both the agents. In Wyners
problem, the agents and the server have access to independent(i.e., private) sources of
randomness. In the variant which we study, in addition to this, the server has access to two
independent sources of randomness each of which is shared with a different
agent/processor. The goal is to minimise the rate of common message. It turns out that
Wyners scheme cannot be directly used to make optimal use of the shared randomness.
We study the trade-off between the rates of the message and the amounts of shared
randomness available.