Group, Lattice and Polar Codes for Multi-terminal Communications

We study the performance of Algebraic codes for multi-terminal communications. This thesis consists of three parts: In the first part, we analyze the performance of group codes for communications systems. We observe that although group codes are not optimal for point-to-point scenarios, they can improve the achievable rate region for several multi-terminal communications settings such as the Distributed Source Coding and Interference Channels. The gains in the rates are particularly significant when the structure of the source/channel is matched to the structure of the underlying group. In the second part, we study the continuous alphabet version of group/linear codes, namely lattice codes. We show that similarly to group codes, lattice codes can improve the achievable rate region for multi-terminal problems. In the third part of the thesis, we present coding schemes based on polar codes to practically achieve the performance limits derived in the two earlier parts. We also present polar coding schemes to achieve the known achievable rate regions for multi-terminal communications problems such as the Distributed Source Coding, the Multiple Description Coding, Broadcast Channels, Interference Channels and Multiple Access Channels.