The source and network models we discussed so far capture many essential ingredients of real-world communication networks, including

Although a general theory for information flow under these models remains elusive, we have seen that there are several coding techniques—some of which are optimal or close to optimal—that promise significant performance improvements over today's practice. Still, the models we discussed do not capture other key aspects of real-world networks.

While these key aspects of real-world networks have been at the heart of the field of computer networks, they have not been satisfactorily addressed by network information theory, either because of their incompatibility with the basic asymptotic approach of information theory or because the resulting models are messy and intractable. There have been several success stories at the intersection of networking and network information theory, however. In this chapter we discuss three representative examples.

We first consider the channel coding problem for a DMC with random data arrival. We show that reliable communication is feasible provided that the data arrival rate is less than the channel capacity. Similar results can be established for multiuser channels and multiple data streams. A key new ingredient in this study is the notion of queue stability.