Achieving Marton's Region for Broadcast Channels Using Polar Codes

This paper presents polar coding schemes for the 2-user discrete memoryless broadcast channel (DM-BC) which achieve Marton's region with both common and private messages. This is the best achievable rate region known to date, and it is tight for all classes of 2-user DM-BCs whose capacity regions are known. To accomplish this task, we first construct polar codes for both the superposition as well as the binning strategy. By combining these two schemes, we obtain Marton's region with private messages only. Finally, we show how to handle the case of common information. The proposed coding schemes possess the usual advantages of polar codes, i.e., they have low encoding and decoding complexity and a super-polynomial decay rate of the error probability. We follow the lead of Goela, Abbe, and Gastpar, who recently introduced polar codes emulating the superposition and binning schemes. In order to align the polar indices, for both schemes, their solution involves some degradedness constraints that are assumed to hold between the auxiliary random variables and the channel outputs. To remove these constraints, we consider the transmission of $k$ blocks and employ a chaining construction that guarantees the proper alignment of the polarized indices. The techniques described in this work are quite general, and they can be adopted to many other multi-terminal scenarios whenever there polar indices need to be aligned.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, accepted to IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory and presented in part at ISIT'1

Joint Unitary Triangularization for Gaussian Multi-User MIMO Networks

The problem of transmitting a common message to multiple users over the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output broadcast channel is considered, where each user is equipped with an arbitrary number of antennas. A closed-loop scenario is assumed, for which a practical capacity-approaching scheme is developed. By applying judiciously chosen unitary operations at the transmit and receive nodes, the channel matrices are triangularized so that the resulting matrices have equal diagonals, up to a possible multiplicative scalar factor. This, along with the utilization of successive interference cancellation, reduces the coding and decoding tasks to those of coding and decoding over the single-antenna additive white Gaussian noise channel. Over the resulting effective channel, any off-the-shelf code may be used. For the two-user case, it was recently shown that such joint unitary triangularization is always possible. In this paper, it is shown that for more than two users, it is necessary to carry out the unitary linear processing jointly over multiple channel uses, i.e., space-time processing is employed. It is further shown that exact triangularization, where all resulting diagonals are equal, is still not always possible, and appropriate conditions for the existence of such are established for certain cases. When exact triangularization is not possible, an asymptotic construction is proposed, that achieves the desired property of equal diagonals up to edge effects that can be made arbitrarily small, at the price of processing a sufficiently large number of channel uses together.Comment: Extended version of published paper in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 61, no. 5, pp. 2662-2692, May 201

Achievable Rates of Concatenated Codes in DNA Storage under Substitution Errors

In this paper, we study achievable rates of concatenated coding schemes over a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) storage channel. Our channel model incorporates the main features of DNA-based data storage. First, information is stored on many, short DNA strands. Second, the strands are stored in an unordered fashion inside the storage medium and each strand is replicated many times. Third, the data is accessed in an uncontrollable manner, i.e., random strands are drawn from the medium and received, possibly with errors. As one of our results, we show that there is a significant gap between the channel capacity and the achievable rate of a standard concatenated code in which one strand corresponds to an inner block. This is in fact surprising as for other channels, such as $q$-ary symmetric channels, concatenated codes are known to achieve the capacity. We further propose a modified concatenated coding scheme by combining several strands into one inner block, which allows to narrow the gap and achieve rates that are close to the capacity.Comment: Extended version of a paper submitted to International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA) 202