Lossy channel systems were originally introduced to model communication protocols. It gave birth to a complexity class wich remained scarcely undersood for a long time. In this thesis we study some of the most important gaps. In particular, we bring matching upper and lower bounds for the time complexity. Then we describe a new proof tool : the Post Embedding Problem (PEP) which is a simple problem, closely related to the Post Correspondence Problem, and complete for this complexity class. Finally, we study PEP, its variants and the languages of solutions of PEP on which we provide complexity results and proof tools like pumping lemmas.
