1,617 research outputs found
Rewriting Codes for Joint Information Storage in Flash Memories
Memories whose storage cells transit irreversibly between
states have been common since the start of the data storage
technology. In recent years, flash memories have become a very
important family of such memories. A flash memory cell has q
states—state 0.1.....q-1 - and can only transit from a lower
state to a higher state before the expensive erasure operation takes
place. We study rewriting codes that enable the data stored in a
group of cells to be rewritten by only shifting the cells to higher
states. Since the considered state transitions are irreversible, the
number of rewrites is bounded. Our objective is to maximize the
number of times the data can be rewritten. We focus on the joint
storage of data in flash memories, and study two rewriting codes
for two different scenarios. The first code, called floating code, is for
the joint storage of multiple variables, where every rewrite changes
one variable. The second code, called buffer code, is for remembering
the most recent data in a data stream. Many of the codes
presented here are either optimal or asymptotically optimal. We
also present bounds to the performance of general codes. The results
show that rewriting codes can integrate a flash memory’s
rewriting capabilities for different variables to a high degree
Universal Lossless Compression with Unknown Alphabets - The Average Case
Universal compression of patterns of sequences generated by independently
identically distributed (i.i.d.) sources with unknown, possibly large,
alphabets is investigated. A pattern is a sequence of indices that contains all
consecutive indices in increasing order of first occurrence. If the alphabet of
a source that generated a sequence is unknown, the inevitable cost of coding
the unknown alphabet symbols can be exploited to create the pattern of the
sequence. This pattern can in turn be compressed by itself. It is shown that if
the alphabet size is essentially small, then the average minimax and
maximin redundancies as well as the redundancy of every code for almost every
source, when compressing a pattern, consist of at least 0.5 log(n/k^3) bits per
each unknown probability parameter, and if all alphabet letters are likely to
occur, there exist codes whose redundancy is at most 0.5 log(n/k^2) bits per
each unknown probability parameter, where n is the length of the data
sequences. Otherwise, if the alphabet is large, these redundancies are
essentially at least O(n^{-2/3}) bits per symbol, and there exist codes that
achieve redundancy of essentially O(n^{-1/2}) bits per symbol. Two sub-optimal
low-complexity sequential algorithms for compression of patterns are presented
and their description lengths analyzed, also pointing out that the pattern
average universal description length can decrease below the underlying i.i.d.\
entropy for large enough alphabets.Comment: Revised for IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Lower Bounds on the Redundancy of Huffman Codes with Known and Unknown Probabilities
In this paper we provide a method to obtain tight lower bounds on the minimum
redundancy achievable by a Huffman code when the probability distribution
underlying an alphabet is only partially known. In particular, we address the
case where the occurrence probabilities are unknown for some of the symbols in
an alphabet. Bounds can be obtained for alphabets of a given size, for
alphabets of up to a given size, and for alphabets of arbitrary size. The
method operates on a Computer Algebra System, yielding closed-form numbers for
all results. Finally, we show the potential of the proposed method to shed some
light on the structure of the minimum redundancy achievable by the Huffman
code
Asymptotic Improvement of the Gilbert-Varshamov Bound on the Size of Binary Codes
Given positive integers and , let denote the maximum size
of a binary code of length and minimum distance . The well-known
Gilbert-Varshamov bound asserts that , where
is the volume of a Hamming sphere of
radius . We show that, in fact, there exists a positive constant such
that whenever . The result follows by recasting the Gilbert- Varshamov bound into a
graph-theoretic framework and using the fact that the corresponding graph is
locally sparse. Generalizations and extensions of this result are briefly
discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; to appear in the IEEE Transactions on
Information Theory, submitted August 12, 2003, revised March 28, 200
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