Abstract
The information spectrum approach gives general formulae for optimal rates of various information theoretic protocols, under minimal assumptions on the nature of the sources, channels and entanglement resources involved. This paper culminates in the derivation of the dense coding capacity for a noiseless quantum channel, assisted by arbitrary shared entanglement, using this approach. We also review the currently known coding theorems, and their converses, for protocols such as data compression for arbitrary quantum sources and transmission of classical information through arbitrary quantum channels. In addition, we derive the optimal rate of data compression for a mixed source