43,316 research outputs found
Re-proving Channel Polarization Theorems: An Extremality and Robustness Analysis
The general subject considered in this thesis is a recently discovered coding
technique, polar coding, which is used to construct a class of error correction
codes with unique properties. In his ground-breaking work, Ar{\i}kan proved
that this class of codes, called polar codes, achieve the symmetric capacity
--- the mutual information evaluated at the uniform input distribution ---of
any stationary binary discrete memoryless channel with low complexity encoders
and decoders requiring in the order of operations in the
block-length . This discovery settled the long standing open problem left by
Shannon of finding low complexity codes achieving the channel capacity.
Polar coding settled an open problem in information theory, yet opened plenty
of challenging problems that need to be addressed. A significant part of this
thesis is dedicated to advancing the knowledge about this technique in two
directions. The first one provides a better understanding of polar coding by
generalizing some of the existing results and discussing their implications,
and the second one studies the robustness of the theory over communication
models introducing various forms of uncertainty or variations into the
probabilistic model of the channel.Comment: Preview of my PhD Thesis, EPFL, Lausanne, 2014. For the full version,
see http://people.epfl.ch/mine.alsan/publication
Faulty Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes for the Binary Erasure Channel
In this paper, faulty successive cancellation decoding of polar codes for the
binary erasure channel is studied. To this end, a simple erasure-based fault
model is introduced to represent errors in the decoder and it is shown that,
under this model, polarization does not happen, meaning that fully reliable
communication is not possible at any rate. Furthermore, a lower bound on the
frame error rate of polar codes under faulty SC decoding is provided, which is
then used, along with a well-known upper bound, in order to choose a
blocklength that minimizes the erasure probability under faulty decoding.
Finally, an unequal error protection scheme that can re-enable asymptotically
erasure-free transmission at a small rate loss and by protecting only a
constant fraction of the decoder is proposed. The same scheme is also shown to
significantly improve the finite-length performance of the faulty successive
cancellation decoder by protecting as little as 1.5% of the decoder.Comment: Accepted for publications in the IEEE Transactions on Communication
Intermediate range chemical ordering of cations in simple molten alkali halides
The presence of first sharp diffraction peaks in the partial structure
factors is investigated in computer simulations of molten mixtures of alkali
halides. An intermediate range ordering appears for the Li+ ions only, which is
associated with clustering of this species and is not reflected in the
arrangement of other ions. This ordering is surprising in view of the
simplicity of the interionic interactions in alkali halides. The clustering
reflects an incomplete mixing of the various species on a local length scale,
which can be demonstrated by studying the complementary sub-space of cations in
the corresponding pure alkali halides by means of a void analysis.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
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