586 research outputs found
A Rate-Compatible Sphere-Packing Analysis of Feedback Coding with Limited Retransmissions
Recent work by Polyanskiy et al. and Chen et al. has excited new interest in
using feedback to approach capacity with low latency. Polyanskiy showed that
feedback identifying the first symbol at which decoding is successful allows
capacity to be approached with surprisingly low latency. This paper uses Chen's
rate-compatible sphere-packing (RCSP) analysis to study what happens when
symbols must be transmitted in packets, as with a traditional hybrid ARQ
system, and limited to relatively few (six or fewer) incremental transmissions.
Numerical optimizations find the series of progressively growing cumulative
block lengths that enable RCSP to approach capacity with the minimum possible
latency. RCSP analysis shows that five incremental transmissions are sufficient
to achieve 92% of capacity with an average block length of fewer than 101
symbols on the AWGN channel with SNR of 2.0 dB.
The RCSP analysis provides a decoding error trajectory that specifies the
decoding error rate for each cumulative block length. Though RCSP is an
idealization, an example tail-biting convolutional code matches the RCSP
decoding error trajectory and achieves 91% of capacity with an average block
length of 102 symbols on the AWGN channel with SNR of 2.0 dB. We also show how
RCSP analysis can be used in cases where packets have deadlines associated with
them (leading to an outage probability).Comment: To be published at the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on
Information Theory, Cambridge, MA, USA. Updated to incorporate reviewers'
comments and add new figure
Feedback Communication Systems with Limitations on Incremental Redundancy
This paper explores feedback systems using incremental redundancy (IR) with
noiseless transmitter confirmation (NTC). For IR-NTC systems based on {\em
finite-length} codes (with blocklength ) and decoding attempts only at {\em
certain specified decoding times}, this paper presents the asymptotic expansion
achieved by random coding, provides rate-compatible sphere-packing (RCSP)
performance approximations, and presents simulation results of tail-biting
convolutional codes.
The information-theoretic analysis shows that values of relatively close
to the expected latency yield the same random-coding achievability expansion as
with . However, the penalty introduced in the expansion by limiting
decoding times is linear in the interval between decoding times. For binary
symmetric channels, the RCSP approximation provides an efficiently-computed
approximation of performance that shows excellent agreement with a family of
rate-compatible, tail-biting convolutional codes in the short-latency regime.
For the additive white Gaussian noise channel, bounded-distance decoding
simplifies the computation of the marginal RCSP approximation and produces
similar results as analysis based on maximum-likelihood decoding for latencies
greater than 200. The efficiency of the marginal RCSP approximation facilitates
optimization of the lengths of incremental transmissions when the number of
incremental transmissions is constrained to be small or the length of the
incremental transmissions is constrained to be uniform after the first
transmission. Finally, an RCSP-based decoding error trajectory is introduced
that provides target error rates for the design of rate-compatible code
families for use in feedback communication systems.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figure
The price of certainty: "waterslide curves" and the gap to capacity
The classical problem of reliable point-to-point digital communication is to
achieve a low probability of error while keeping the rate high and the total
power consumption small. Traditional information-theoretic analysis uses
`waterfall' curves to convey the revolutionary idea that unboundedly low
probabilities of bit-error are attainable using only finite transmit power.
However, practitioners have long observed that the decoder complexity, and
hence the total power consumption, goes up when attempting to use sophisticated
codes that operate close to the waterfall curve.
This paper gives an explicit model for power consumption at an idealized
decoder that allows for extreme parallelism in implementation. The decoder
architecture is in the spirit of message passing and iterative decoding for
sparse-graph codes. Generalized sphere-packing arguments are used to derive
lower bounds on the decoding power needed for any possible code given only the
gap from the Shannon limit and the desired probability of error. As the gap
goes to zero, the energy per bit spent in decoding is shown to go to infinity.
This suggests that to optimize total power, the transmitter should operate at a
power that is strictly above the minimum demanded by the Shannon capacity.
The lower bound is plotted to show an unavoidable tradeoff between the
average bit-error probability and the total power used in transmission and
decoding. In the spirit of conventional waterfall curves, we call these
`waterslide' curves.Comment: 37 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory. This version corrects a subtle bug in the proofs of the original
submission and improves the bounds significantl
- β¦