Communication under Strong Asynchronism

We consider asynchronous communication over point-to-point discrete memoryless channels. The transmitter starts sending one block codeword at an instant that is uniformly distributed within a certain time period, which represents the level of asynchronism. The receiver, by means of a sequential decoder, must isolate the message without knowing when the codeword transmission starts but being cognizant of the asynchronism level A. We are interested in how quickly can the receiver isolate the sent message, particularly in the regime where A is exponentially larger than the codeword length N, which we refer to as `strong asynchronism.' This model of sparse communication may represent the situation of a sensor that remains idle most of the time and, only occasionally, transmits information to a remote base station which needs to quickly take action. The first result shows that vanishing error probability can be guaranteed as N tends to infinity while A grows as Exp(N*k) if and only if k does not exceed the `synchronization threshold,' a constant that admits a simple closed form expression, and is at least as large as the capacity of the synchronized channel. The second result is the characterization of a set of achievable strictly positive rates in the regime where A is exponential in N, and where the rate is defined with respect to the expected delay between the time information starts being emitted until the time the receiver makes a decision. As an application of the first result we consider antipodal signaling over a Gaussian channel and derive a simple necessary condition between A, N, and SNR for achieving reliable communication.Comment: 26 page

Training-Based Schemes are Suboptimal for High Rate Asynchronous Communication

We consider asynchronous point-to-point communication. Building on a recently developed model, we show that training based schemes, i.e., communication strategies that separate synchronization from information transmission, perform suboptimally at high rate.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (Taormina

Optimal Sequential Frame Synchronization

We consider the `one-shot frame synchronization problem' where a decoder wants to locate a sync pattern at the output of a channel on the basis of sequential observations. We assume that the sync pattern of length N starts being emitted at a random time within some interval of size A, that characterizes the asynchronism level between the transmitter and the receiver. We show that a sequential decoder can optimally locate the sync pattern, i.e., exactly, without delay, and with probability approaching one as N tends to infinity, if and only if the asynchronism level grows as O(exp(N*k)), with k below the `synchronization threshold,' a constant that admits a simple expression depending on the channel. This constant is the same as the one that characterizes the limit for reliable asynchronous communication, as was recently reported by the authors. If k exceeds the synchronization threshold, any decoder, sequential or non-sequential, locates the sync pattern with an error that tends to one as N tends to infinity. Hence, a sequential decoder can locate a sync pattern as well as the (non-sequential) maximum likelihood decoder that operates on the basis of output sequences of maximum length A+N-1, but with much fewer observations.Comment: 6 page