Quantum Channel Capacities Per Unit Cost

Communication over a noisy channel is often conducted in a setting in which different input symbols to the channel incur a certain cost. For example, for bosonic quantum channels, the cost associated with an input state is the number of photons, which is proportional to the energy consumed. In such a setting, it is often useful to know the maximum amount of information that can be reliably transmitted per cost incurred. This is known as the capacity per unit cost. In this paper, we generalize the capacity per unit cost to various communication tasks involving a quantum channel such as classical communication, entanglement-assisted classical communication, private communication, and quantum communication. For each task, we define the corresponding capacity per unit cost and derive a formula for it analogous to that of the usual capacity. Furthermore, for the special and natural case in which there is a zero-cost state, we obtain expressions in terms of an optimized relative entropy involving the zero-cost state. For each communication task, we construct an explicit pulse-position-modulation coding scheme that achieves the capacity per unit cost. Finally, we compute capacities per unit cost for various bosonic Gaussian channels and introduce the notion of a blocklength constraint as a proposed solution to the long-standing issue of infinite capacities per unit cost. This motivates the idea of a blocklength-cost duality, on which we elaborate in depth.Comment: v3: 18 pages, 2 figure

Capacity per Unit Energy of Fading Channels with a Peak Constraint

A discrete-time single-user scalar channel with temporally correlated Rayleigh fading is analyzed. There is no side information at the transmitter or the receiver. A simple expression is given for the capacity per unit energy, in the presence of a peak constraint. The simple formula of Verdu for capacity per unit cost is adapted to a channel with memory, and is used in the proof. In addition to bounding the capacity of a channel with correlated fading, the result gives some insight into the relationship between the correlation in the fading process and the channel capacity. The results are extended to a channel with side information, showing that the capacity per unit energy is one nat per Joule, independently of the peak power constraint. A continuous-time version of the model is also considered. The capacity per unit energy subject to a peak constraint (but no bandwidth constraint) is given by an expression similar to that for discrete time, and is evaluated for Gauss-Markov and Clarke fading channels.Comment: Journal version of paper presented in ISIT 2003 - now accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Energy and Sampling Constrained Asynchronous Communication

The minimum energy, and, more generally, the minimum cost, to transmit one bit of information has been recently derived for bursty communication when information is available infrequently at random times at the transmitter. This result assumes that the receiver is always in the listening mode and samples all channel outputs until it makes a decision. If the receiver is constrained to sample only a fraction f>0 of the channel outputs, what is the cost penalty due to sparse output sampling? Remarkably, there is no penalty: regardless of f>0 the asynchronous capacity per unit cost is the same as under full sampling, ie, when f=1. There is not even a penalty in terms of decoding delay---the elapsed time between when information is available until when it is decoded. This latter result relies on the possibility to sample adaptively; the next sample can be chosen as a function of past samples. Under non-adaptive sampling, it is possible to achieve the full sampling asynchronous capacity per unit cost, but the decoding delay gets multiplied by 1/f. Therefore adaptive sampling strategies are of particular interest in the very sparse sampling regime.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Information Rates of ASK-Based Molecular Communication in Fluid Media

This paper studies the capacity of molecular communications in fluid media, where the information is encoded in the number of transmitted molecules in a time-slot (amplitude shift keying). The propagation of molecules is governed by random Brownian motion and the communication is in general subject to inter-symbol interference (ISI). We first consider the case where ISI is negligible and analyze the capacity and the capacity per unit cost of the resulting discrete memoryless molecular channel and the effect of possible practical constraints, such as limitations on peak and/or average number of transmitted molecules per transmission. In the case with a constrained peak molecular emission, we show that as the time-slot duration increases, the input distribution achieving the capacity per channel use transitions from binary inputs to a discrete uniform distribution. In this paper, we also analyze the impact of ISI. Crucially, we account for the correlation that ISI induces between channel output symbols. We derive an upper bound and two lower bounds on the capacity in this setting. Using the input distribution obtained by an extended Blahut-Arimoto algorithm, we maximize the lower bounds. Our results show that, over a wide range of parameter values, the bounds are close.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication on IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communication

Capacity investigation of on-off keying in noncoherent channel settings at low SNR

On–off keying (OOK) has repossessed much new research interest to realize green communication for establishing autonomous sensor networks. To realize ultra-low power wireless design, we investigate the minimum energy per bit required for reliable communication of using OOK in a noncoherent channel setting where envelope detection is applied at the receiver. By defining different OOK channels with average transit power constraints, the achievability of the Shannon limit for both cases of using soft and hard decisions at the channel output is evaluated based on the analysis of the capacity per unit-cost at low signal-to-noise ratio. We demonstrate that in phase fading using hard decisions cannot destroy the capacity only if extremely asymmetric OOK inputs are used with a properly chosen threshold. The corresponding pulse-position modulation scheme is explicitly studied and demonstrated to be a Shannon-type solution. Moreover, we also consider a slow Rayleigh fading scenario where the transmitter and receiver have no access to channel realizations.Throughput per unit-cost results are developed to explore the trade-off between power efficiency and channel quality for noncoherent OOK using soft and hard decisions