4,396 research outputs found
Distributed Structure: Joint Expurgation for the Multiple-Access Channel
In this work we show how an improved lower bound to the error exponent of the
memoryless multiple-access (MAC) channel is attained via the use of linear
codes, thus demonstrating that structure can be beneficial even in cases where
there is no capacity gain. We show that if the MAC channel is modulo-additive,
then any error probability, and hence any error exponent, achievable by a
linear code for the corresponding single-user channel, is also achievable for
the MAC channel. Specifically, for an alphabet of prime cardinality, where
linear codes achieve the best known exponents in the single-user setting and
the optimal exponent above the critical rate, this performance carries over to
the MAC setting. At least at low rates, where expurgation is needed, our
approach strictly improves performance over previous results, where expurgation
was used at most for one of the users. Even when the MAC channel is not
additive, it may be transformed into such a channel. While the transformation
is lossy, we show that the distributed structure gain in some "nearly additive"
cases outweighs the loss, and thus the error exponent can improve upon the best
known error exponent for these cases as well. Finally we apply a similar
approach to the Gaussian MAC channel. We obtain an improvement over the best
known achievable exponent, given by Gallager, for certain rate pairs, using
lattice codes which satisfy a nesting condition.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Trans. Info. Theor
Efficient Decoding Algorithms for the Compute-and-Forward Strategy
We address in this paper decoding aspects of the Compute-and-Forward (CF)
physical-layer network coding strategy. It is known that the original decoder
for the CF is asymptotically optimal. However, its performance gap to optimal
decoders in practical settings are still not known. In this work, we develop
and assess the performance of novel decoding algorithms for the CF operating in
the multiple access channel. For the fading channel, we analyze the ML decoder
and develop a novel diophantine approximation-based decoding algorithm showed
numerically to outperform the original CF decoder. For the Gaussian channel, we
investigate the maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder. We derive a novel MAP
decoding metric and develop practical decoding algorithms proved numerically to
outperform the original one
Optimal Population Codes for Space: Grid Cells Outperform Place Cells
Rodents use two distinct neuronal coordinate systems to estimate their position: place fields in the hippocampus and grid fields in the entorhinal cortex. Whereas place cells spike at only one particular spatial location, grid cells fire at multiple sites that correspond to the points of an imaginary hexagonal lattice. We study how to best construct place and grid codes, taking the probabilistic nature of neural spiking into account. Which spatial encoding properties of individual neurons confer the highest resolution when decoding the animal’s position from the neuronal population response? A priori, estimating a spatial position from a grid code could be ambiguous, as regular periodic lattices possess translational symmetry. The solution to this problem requires lattices for grid cells with different spacings; the spatial resolution crucially depends on choosing the right ratios of these spacings across the population. We compute the expected error in estimating the position in both the asymptotic limit, using Fisher information, and for low spike counts, using maximum likelihood estimation. Achieving high spatial resolution and covering a large range of space in a grid code leads to a trade-off: the best grid code for spatial resolution is built of nested modules with different spatial periods, one inside the other, whereas maximizing the spatial range requires distinct spatial periods that are pairwisely incommensurate. Optimizing the spatial resolution predicts two grid cell properties that have been experimentally observed. First, short lattice spacings should outnumber long lattice spacings. Second, the grid code should be self-similar across different lattice spacings, so that the grid field always covers a fixed fraction of the lattice period. If these conditions are satisfied and the spatial “tuning curves” for each neuron span the same range of firing rates, then the resolution of the grid code easily exceeds that of the best possible place code with the same number of neurons
Precoded Integer-Forcing Universally Achieves the MIMO Capacity to Within a Constant Gap
An open-loop single-user multiple-input multiple-output communication scheme
is considered where a transmitter, equipped with multiple antennas, encodes the
data into independent streams all taken from the same linear code. The coded
streams are then linearly precoded using the encoding matrix of a perfect
linear dispersion space-time code. At the receiver side, integer-forcing
equalization is applied, followed by standard single-stream decoding. It is
shown that this communication architecture achieves the capacity of any
Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output channel up to a gap that depends only
on the number of transmit antennas.Comment: to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
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