Communication Complexity

Communication Complexity is the study of the information theoretic requirements for computations whose input is distributed over several cooperating agents. It is is a central tool for obtaining lower bounds in several areas, especially in circuit complexity and computation using bounded space. With the advent of quantum computation, a model of quantum communication has also been studied. Several communication models have been defined to handle different applications, and deep combinatorial, algebraic, probabilistic and geometric techniques play an important role in analysing these. Recently, deep combinatorial, algebraic and geometric techniques have been employed to understand communication problems,and there is emerging a set of powerful techniques that bring hitherto inaccessible problems tantalisingly close to resolution. Interestingly, these techniques apply to both the classical and the quantum models.