Information and inference in the wireless physical layer

Wireless networking applications continue to motivate challenging problems in information theory, signal processing, and other fields. This article explores briefly four research areas, primarily involving information theoretic or inferential problems, each of which is motivated by a wireless application-layer issue. In particular, the four applications of secure file transfer, inference, real-time multimedia transmission, and social networking, are used to motivate consideration of four respective research problems involving the wireless physical layer: physical layer security in data networks, distributed inference in sensor networks, finite-blocklength capacity in multimedia networks, and connectivity in small-world networks.