Asymptotic Estimates in Information Theory with Non-Vanishing Error Probabilities

This monograph presents a unified treatment of single- and multi-user problems in Shannon's information theory where we depart from the requirement that the error probability decays asymptotically in the blocklength. Instead, the error probabilities for various problems are bounded above by a non-vanishing constant and the spotlight is shone on achievable coding rates as functions of the growing blocklengths. This represents the study of asymptotic estimates with non-vanishing error probabilities. In Part I, after reviewing the fundamentals of information theory, we discuss Strassen's seminal result for binary hypothesis testing where the type-I error probability is non-vanishing and the rate of decay of the type-II error probability with growing number of independent observations is characterized. In Part II, we use this basic hypothesis testing result to develop second- and sometimes, even third-order asymptotic expansions for point-to-point communication. Finally in Part III, we consider network information theory problems for which the second-order asymptotics are known. These problems include some classes of channels with random state, the multiple-encoder distributed lossless source coding (Slepian-Wolf) problem and special cases of the Gaussian interference and multiple-access channels. Finally, we discuss avenues for further research.Comment: Further comments welcom

Second-order coding rates for pure-loss bosonic channels

A pure-loss bosonic channel is a simple model for communication over free-space or fiber-optic links. More generally, phase-insensitive bosonic channels model other kinds of noise, such as thermalizing or amplifying processes. Recent work has established the classical capacity of all of these channels, and furthermore, it is now known that a strong converse theorem holds for the classical capacity of these channels under a particular photon number constraint. The goal of the present paper is to initiate the study of second-order coding rates for these channels, by beginning with the simplest one, the pure-loss bosonic channel. In a second-order analysis of communication, one fixes the tolerable error probability and seeks to understand the back-off from capacity for a sufficiently large yet finite number of channel uses. We find a lower bound on the maximum achievable code size for the pure-loss bosonic channel, in terms of the known expression for its capacity and a quantity called channel dispersion. We accomplish this by proving a general "one-shot" coding theorem for channels with classical inputs and pure-state quantum outputs which reside in a separable Hilbert space. The theorem leads to an optimal second-order characterization when the channel output is finite-dimensional, and it remains an open question to determine whether the characterization is optimal for the pure-loss bosonic channel.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures; v3: final version accepted for publication in Quantum Information Processin