A General Framework for Transmission with Transceiver Distortion and Some Applications

A general theoretical framework is presented for analyzing information transmission over Gaussian channels with memoryless transceiver distortion, which encompasses various nonlinear distortion models including transmit-side clipping, receive-side analog-to-digital conversion, and others. The framework is based on the so-called generalized mutual information (GMI), and the analysis in particular benefits from the setup of Gaussian codebook ensemble and nearest-neighbor decoding, for which it is established that the GMI takes a general form analogous to the channel capacity of undistorted Gaussian channels, with a reduced "effective" signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that depends on the nominal SNR and the distortion model. When applied to specific distortion models, an array of results of engineering relevance is obtained. For channels with transmit-side distortion only, it is shown that a conventional approach, which treats the distorted signal as the sum of the original signal part and a uncorrelated distortion part, achieves the GMI. For channels with output quantization, closed-form expressions are obtained for the effective SNR and the GMI, and related optimization problems are formulated and solved for quantizer design. Finally, super-Nyquist sampling is analyzed within the general framework, and it is shown that sampling beyond the Nyquist rate increases the GMI for all SNR. For example, with a binary symmetric output quantization, information rates exceeding one bit per channel use are achievable by sampling the output at four times the Nyquist rate.Comment: 32 pages (including 4 figures, 5 tables, and auxiliary materials); submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

Generalized Nearest Neighbor Decoding

It is well known that for Gaussian channels, a nearest neighbor decoding rule, which seeks the minimum Euclidean distance between a codeword and the received channel output vector, is the maximum likelihood solution and hence capacity-achieving. Nearest neighbor decoding remains a convenient and yet mismatched solution for general channels, and the key message of this paper is that the performance of the nearest neighbor decoding can be improved by generalizing its decoding metric to incorporate channel state dependent output processing and codeword scaling. Using generalized mutual information, which is a lower bound to the mismatched capacity under independent and identically distributed codebook ensemble, as the performance measure, this paper establishes the optimal generalized nearest neighbor decoding rule, under Gaussian channel input. Several {restricted forms of the} generalized nearest neighbor decoding rule are also derived and compared with existing solutions. The results are illustrated through several case studies for fading channels with imperfect receiver channel state information and for channels with quantization effects.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figure

Information-Theoretic Foundations of Mismatched Decoding

Shannon's channel coding theorem characterizes the maximal rate of information that can be reliably transmitted over a communication channel when optimal encoding and decoding strategies are used. In many scenarios, however, practical considerations such as channel uncertainty and implementation constraints rule out the use of an optimal decoder. The mismatched decoding problem addresses such scenarios by considering the case that the decoder cannot be optimized, but is instead fixed as part of the problem statement. This problem is not only of direct interest in its own right, but also has close connections with other long-standing theoretical problems in information theory. In this monograph, we survey both classical literature and recent developments on the mismatched decoding problem, with an emphasis on achievable random-coding rates for memoryless channels. We present two widely-considered achievable rates known as the generalized mutual information (GMI) and the LM rate, and overview their derivations and properties. In addition, we survey several improved rates via multi-user coding techniques, as well as recent developments and challenges in establishing upper bounds on the mismatch capacity, and an analogous mismatched encoding problem in rate-distortion theory. Throughout the monograph, we highlight a variety of applications and connections with other prominent information theory problems.Comment: Published in Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory (Volume 17, Issue 2-3