Write Channel Model for Bit-Patterned Media Recording

We propose a new write channel model for bit-patterned media recording that reflects the data dependence of write synchronization errors. It is shown that this model accommodates both substitution-like errors and insertion-deletion errors whose statistics are determined by an underlying channel state process. We study information theoretic properties of the write channel model, including the capacity, symmetric information rate, Markov-1 rate and the zero-error capacity.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, journa

File Updates Under Random/Arbitrary Insertions And Deletions

A client/encoder edits a file, as modeled by an insertion-deletion (InDel) process. An old copy of the file is stored remotely at a data-centre/decoder, and is also available to the client. We consider the problem of throughput- and computationally-efficient communication from the client to the data-centre, to enable the server to update its copy to the newly edited file. We study two models for the source files/edit patterns: the random pre-edit sequence left-to-right random InDel (RPES-LtRRID) process, and the arbitrary pre-edit sequence arbitrary InDel (APES-AID) process. In both models, we consider the regime in which the number of insertions/deletions is a small (but constant) fraction of the original file. For both models we prove information-theoretic lower bounds on the best possible compression rates that enable file updates. Conversely, our compression algorithms use dynamic programming (DP) and entropy coding, and achieve rates that are approximately optimal.Comment: The paper is an extended version of our paper to be appeared at ITW 201

Energy-Efficient Communication over the Unsynchronized Gaussian Diamond Network

Communication networks are often designed and analyzed assuming tight synchronization among nodes. However, in applications that require communication in the energy-efficient regime of low signal-to-noise ratios, establishing tight synchronization among nodes in the network can result in a significant energy overhead. Motivated by a recent result showing that near-optimal energy efficiency can be achieved over the AWGN channel without requiring tight synchronization, we consider the question of whether the potential gains of cooperative communication can be achieved in the absence of synchronization. We focus on the symmetric Gaussian diamond network and establish that cooperative-communication gains are indeed feasible even with unsynchronized nodes. More precisely, we show that the capacity per unit energy of the unsynchronized symmetric Gaussian diamond network is within a constant factor of the capacity per unit energy of the corresponding synchronized network. To this end, we propose a distributed relaying scheme that does not require tight synchronization but nevertheless achieves most of the energy gains of coherent combining.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, presented at IEEE ISIT 201

An Upper Bound on the Capacity of non-Binary Deletion Channels

We derive an upper bound on the capacity of non-binary deletion channels. Although binary deletion channels have received significant attention over the years, and many upper and lower bounds on their capacity have been derived, such studies for the non-binary case are largely missing. The state of the art is the following: as a trivial upper bound, capacity of an erasure channel with the same input alphabet as the deletion channel can be used, and as a lower bound the results by Diggavi and Grossglauser are available. In this paper, we derive the first non-trivial non-binary deletion channel capacity upper bound and reduce the gap with the existing achievable rates. To derive the results we first prove an inequality between the capacity of a 2K-ary deletion channel with deletion probability $d$, denoted by $C_{2K}(d)$, and the capacity of the binary deletion channel with the same deletion probability, $C_2(d)$, that is, $C_{2K}(d)\leq C_2(d)+(1-d)\log(K)$. Then by employing some existing upper bounds on the capacity of the binary deletion channel, we obtain upper bounds on the capacity of the 2K-ary deletion channel. We illustrate via examples the use of the new bounds and discuss their asymptotic behavior as $d \rightarrow 0$.Comment: accepted for presentation in ISIT 201

Interactive Coding Resilient to an Unknown Number of Erasures

We consider distributed computations between two parties carried out over a noisy channel that may erase messages. Following a noise model proposed by Dani et al. (2018), the noise level observed by the parties during the computation in our setting is arbitrary and a priori unknown to the parties. We develop interactive coding schemes that adapt to the actual level of noise and correctly execute any two-party computation. Namely, in case the channel erases T transmissions, the coding scheme will take N+2T transmissions using an alphabet of size 4 (alternatively, using 2N+4T transmissions over a binary channel) to correctly simulate any binary protocol that takes N transmissions assuming a noiseless channel. We can further reduce the communication to N+T by relaxing the communication model and allowing parties to remain silent rather than forcing them to communicate in every round of the coding scheme. Our coding schemes are efficient, deterministic, have linear overhead both in their communication and round complexity, and succeed (with probability 1) regardless of the number of erasures T

Bounds on the Capacity of Random Insertion and Deletion-Additive Noise Channels

We develop several analytical lower bounds on the capacity of binary insertion and deletion channels by considering independent uniformly distributed (i.u.d.) inputs and computing lower bounds on the mutual information between the input and output sequences. For the deletion channel, we consider two different models: independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) deletion-substitution channel and i.i.d. deletion channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). These two models are considered to incorporate effects of the channel noise along with the synchronization errors. For the insertion channel case we consider the Gallager's model in which the transmitted bits are replaced with two random bits and uniform over the four possibilities independently of any other insertion events. The general approach taken is similar in all cases, however the specific computations differ. Furthermore, the approach yields a useful lower bound on the capacity for a wide range of deletion probabilities for the deletion channels, while it provides a beneficial bound only for small insertion probabilities (less than 0.25) for the insertion model adopted. We emphasize the importance of these results by noting that 1) our results are the first analytical bounds on the capacity of deletion-AWGN channels, 2) the results developed are the best available analytical lower bounds on the deletion-substitution case, 3) for the Gallager insertion channel model, the new lower bound improves the existing results for small insertion probabilities.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor