1, information theory and coding research are the most basic problems of the whole communication. It can be said that information theory is the outline of our major. From Shannon's publication of Mathematical Principles in Communication in 1948 to more than 60 years now, information theory has irreplaceable guiding significance for the development of the whole industry. The most famous information theory is Shannon's four theorems (generally called the three theorems in China). The first theorem of source coding is to solve the problem of source compression in communication, and it is also the basic theorem of image and video compression later. The second theorem, the channel coding theorem, is to solve the problem of the maximum data rate that a specific channel can transmit in communication, that is, the maximum data rate is less than the channel capacity, and the capacity problem is one of the most active problems in communication, such as MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output, or Multiple Antennas) technology widely used in 4G or LTE, whose theoretical essence is the linear increasing relationship between the capacity and the number of antennas proposed by David Tse (this sentence is an overview, and I wrote it by impression); The third theorem, the lossy source coding theorem, solves the problem of source coding under the condition of allowing some distortion, such as jpeg image coding and mp3 audio coding, which are all lossy coding, and are all obtained under the boundary of Shannon's third theorem. The fourth theorem, the separation theorem of source and channel, solves the problem that source coding and channel coding can be solved separately, so now some people can do source coding and some people can do channel coding.
2. This course is difficult, and the introduction of information theory in China is relatively late, not to mention the importance attached by domestic scholars to information theory (there are almost no well-known scholars in this field in China), but this course is indeed the basis of communication. Just as Euclid's geometry originally influenced western academic circles for nearly 2000 years, information theory will certainly influence the development of communication in the next few hundred years.
3. Back to reality, if this course is closely related to the major, I think it is necessary to study information theory seriously in the study of physical layer (mainly wireless communication), coding (channel coding or image and video coding) and cryptography. For the other two subjects, such as network layer, hardware design and optical fiber communication, you only need to know these four (or three) theorems to learn this course.
With so much information theory, what's the use of coding?