8 research outputs found
The Binary Energy Harvesting Channel with a Unit-Sized Battery
We consider a binary energy harvesting communication channel with a
finite-sized battery at the transmitter. In this model, the channel input is
constrained by the available energy at each channel use, which is driven by an
external energy harvesting process, the size of the battery, and the previous
channel inputs. We consider an abstraction where energy is harvested in binary
units and stored in a battery with the capacity of a single unit, and the
channel inputs are binary. Viewing the available energy in the battery as a
state, this is a state-dependent channel with input-dependent states, memory in
the states, and causal state information available at the transmitter only. We
find an equivalent representation for this channel based on the timings of the
symbols, and determine the capacity of the resulting equivalent timing channel
via an auxiliary random variable. We give achievable rates based on certain
selections of this auxiliary random variable which resemble lattice coding for
the timing channel. We develop upper bounds for the capacity by using a
genie-aided method, and also by quantifying the leakage of the state
information to the receiver. We show that the proposed achievable rates are
asymptotically capacity achieving for small energy harvesting rates. We extend
the results to the case of ternary channel inputs. Our achievable rates give
the capacity of the binary channel within 0.03 bits/channel use, the ternary
channel within 0.05 bits/channel use, and outperform basic Shannon strategies
that only consider instantaneous battery states, for all parameter values.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, August 201
Can Feedback Increase the Capacity of the Energy Harvesting Channel?
We investigate if feedback can increase the capacity of an energy harvesting
communication channel where a transmitter powered by an exogenous energy
arrival process and equipped with a finite battery communicates to a receiver
over a memoryless channel. For a simple special case where the energy arrival
process is deterministic and the channel is a BEC, we explicitly compute the
feed-forward and feedback capacities and show that feedback can strictly
increase the capacity of this channel. Building on this example, we also show
that feedback can increase the capacity when the energy arrivals are i.i.d.
known noncausally at the transmitter and the receiver
Bits through queues with feedback
In their paper Anantharam and Verd\'u showed that feedback does not
increase the capacity of a queue when the service time is exponentially
distributed. Whether this conclusion holds for general service times has
remained an open question which this paper addresses.
Two main results are established for both the discrete-time and the
continuous-time models. First, a sufficient condition on the service
distribution for feedback to increase capacity under FIFO service policy.
Underlying this condition is a notion of weak feedback wherein instead of the
queue departure times the transmitter is informed about the instants when
packets start to be served. Second, a condition in terms of output entropy rate
under which feedback does not increase capacity. This condition is general in
that it depends on the output entropy rate of the queue but explicitly depends
neither on the queue policy nor on the service time distribution. This
condition is satisfied, for instance, by queues with LCFS service policies and
bounded service times
Finite-State Channels with Feedback and State Known at the Encoder
We consider finite state channels (FSCs) with feedback and state information
known causally at the encoder. This setting is quite general and includes: a
memoryless channel with i.i.d. state (the Shannon strategy), Markovian states
that include look-ahead (LA) access to the state and energy harvesting. We
characterize the feedback capacity of the general setting as the directed
information between auxiliary random variables with memory to the channel
outputs. We also propose two methods for computing the feedback capacity: (i)
formulating an infinite-horizon average-reward dynamic program; and (ii) a
single-letter lower bound based on auxiliary directed graphs called -graphs.
We demonstrate our computation methods on several examples. In the first
example, we introduce a channel with LA and derive a closed-form, analytic
lower bound on its feedback capacity. Furthermore, we show that the mentioned
methods achieve the feedback capacity of known unifilar FSCs such as the
trapdoor channel, the Ising channel and the input-constrained erasure channel.
Finally, we analyze the feedback capacity of a channel whose state is
stochastically dependent on the input.Comment: 39 pages, 10 figures. The material in this paper was presented in
part at the 56th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and
Computing, Monticello, IL, USA, October 2018, and at the IEEE International
Symposium on Information Theory, Los Angeles, CA, USA, June 202