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

Control-theoretic Approach to Communication with Feedback: Fundamental Limits and Code Design

Feedback communication is studied from a control-theoretic perspective, mapping the communication problem to a control problem in which the control signal is received through the same noisy channel as in the communication problem, and the (nonlinear and time-varying) dynamics of the system determine a subclass of encoders available at the transmitter. The MMSE capacity is defined to be the supremum exponential decay rate of the mean square decoding error. This is upper bounded by the information-theoretic feedback capacity, which is the supremum of the achievable rates. A sufficient condition is provided under which the upper bound holds with equality. For the special class of stationary Gaussian channels, a simple application of Bode's integral formula shows that the feedback capacity, recently characterized by Kim, is equal to the maximum instability that can be tolerated by the controller under a given power constraint. Finally, the control mapping is generalized to the N-sender AWGN multiple access channel. It is shown that Kramer's code for this channel, which is known to be sum rate optimal in the class of generalized linear feedback codes, can be obtained by solving a linear quadratic Gaussian control problem.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro

Distributive Power Control Algorithm for Multicarrier Interference Network over Time-Varying Fading Channels - Tracking Performance Analysis and Optimization

Distributed power control over interference limited network has received an increasing intensity of interest over the past few years. Distributed solutions (like the iterative water-filling, gradient projection, etc.) have been intensively investigated under \emph{quasi-static} channels. However, as such distributed solutions involve iterative updating and explicit message passing, it is unrealistic to assume that the wireless channel remains unchanged during the iterations. Unfortunately, the behavior of those distributed solutions under \emph{time-varying} channels is in general unknown. In this paper, we shall investigate the distributed scaled gradient projection algorithm (DSGPA) in a $K$ pairs multicarrier interference network under a finite-state Markov channel (FSMC) model. We shall analyze the \emph{convergence property} as well as \emph{tracking performance} of the proposed DSGPA. Our analysis shows that the proposed DSGPA converges to a limit region rather than a single point under the FSMC model. We also show that the order of growth of the tracking errors is given by \mathcal{O}\(1 \big/ \bar{N}\), where $\bar{N}$ is the \emph{average sojourn time} of the FSMC. Based on the analysis, we shall derive the \emph{tracking error optimal scaling matrices} via Markov decision process modeling. We shall show that the tracking error optimal scaling matrices can be implemented distributively at each transmitter. The numerical results show the superior performance of the proposed DSGPA over three baseline schemes, such as the gradient projection algorithm with a constant stepsize.Comment: To Appear on the IEEE Transaction on Signal Processin

Sequential decoding on intersymbol interference channels with application to magnetic recording

Ankara : Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 1990.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1990.Includes bibliographical references leaves 27-28In this work we treat sequential decoding in the problem of sequence estimation on intersymbol interference ( ISI ) channels. We consider the magnetic recording channel as the particular ISI channel and investigate the coding gains that can be achieved with sequential decoding for different information densities. Since the cutoff rate determines this quantity , we find lower bounds to the cutoff rate. The symmetric cutoff rate is computed as a theoretical lower bound and practical lower bounds are found through simulations. Since the optimum decoding metric is impractical, a sub-optimum metric has been used in the simulations. The results show that this metric can not achieve the cutoff rate in general, but still its performance is not far from that of the optimum metric. We compare the results to those of Immink[9] and see that one can achieve positive coding gains at information densities of practical interest where other practical codes used in magnetic recording show coding loss.Alanyalı, MuratM.S