An Efficient Joint Source-Channel Decoder with Dynamical Block Priors

An efficient joint source-channel (s/c) decoder based on the side information of the source and on the MN-Gallager algorithm over Galois fields is presented. The dynamical block priors (DBP) are derived either from a statistical mechanical approach via calculation of the entropy for the correlated sequences, or from the Markovian transition matrix. The Markovian joint s/c decoder has many advantages over the statistical mechanical approach. In particular, there is no need for the construction and the diagonalization of a qXq matrix and for a solution to saddle point equations in q dimensions. Using parametric estimation, an efficient joint s/c decoder with the lack of side information is discussed. Besides the variant joint s/c decoders presented, we also show that the available sets of autocorrelations consist of a convex volume, and its structure can be found using the Simplex algorithm.Comment: 13 pages, to appear in "Progress in Theoretical Physics Supplement", May 200

Finite-Block-Length Analysis in Classical and Quantum Information Theory

Coding technology is used in several information processing tasks. In particular, when noise during transmission disturbs communications, coding technology is employed to protect the information. However, there are two types of coding technology: coding in classical information theory and coding in quantum information theory. Although the physical media used to transmit information ultimately obey quantum mechanics, we need to choose the type of coding depending on the kind of information device, classical or quantum, that is being used. In both branches of information theory, there are many elegant theoretical results under the ideal assumption that an infinitely large system is available. In a realistic situation, we need to account for finite size effects. The present paper reviews finite size effects in classical and quantum information theory with respect to various topics, including applied aspects

Tight Upper and Lower Bounds to the Information Rate of the Phase Noise Channel

Numerical upper and lower bounds to the information rate transferred through the additive white Gaussian noise channel affected by discrete-time multiplicative autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) phase noise are proposed in the paper. The state space of the ARMA model being multidimensional, the problem cannot be approached by the conventional trellis-based methods that assume a first-order model for phase noise and quantization of the phase space, because the number of state of the trellis would be enormous. The proposed lower and upper bounds are based on particle filtering and Kalman filtering. Simulation results show that the upper and lower bounds are so close to each other that we can claim of having numerically computed the actual information rate of the multiplicative ARMA phase noise channel, at least in the cases studied in the paper. Moreover, the lower bound, which is virtually capacity-achieving, is obtained by demodulation of the incoming signal based on a Kalman filter aided by past data. Thus we can claim of having found the virtually optimal demodulator for the multiplicative phase noise channel, at least for the cases considered in the paper.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for presentation at ISIT 201

The age of information in gossip networks

We introduce models of gossip based communication networks in which each node is simultaneously a sensor, a relay and a user of information. We model the status of ages of information between nodes as a discrete time Markov chain. In this setting a gossip transmission policy is a decision made at each node regarding what type of information to relay at any given time (if any). When transmission policies are based on random decisions, we are able to analyze the age of information in certain illustrative structured examples either by means of an explicit analysis, an algorithm or asymptotic approximations. Our key contribution is presenting this class of models.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure