10 research outputs found
On the Throughput of Channels that Wear Out
This work investigates the fundamental limits of communication over a noisy
discrete memoryless channel that wears out, in the sense of signal-dependent
catastrophic failure. In particular, we consider a channel that starts as a
memoryless binary-input channel and when the number of transmitted ones causes
a sufficient amount of damage, the channel ceases to convey signals. Constant
composition codes are adopted to obtain an achievability bound and the
left-concave right-convex inequality is then refined to obtain a converse bound
on the log-volume throughput for channels that wear out. Since infinite
blocklength codes will always wear out the channel for any finite threshold of
failure and therefore cannot convey information at positive rates, we analyze
the performance of finite blocklength codes to determine the maximum expected
transmission volume at a given level of average error probability. We show that
this maximization problem has a recursive form and can be solved by dynamic
programming. Numerical results demonstrate that a sequence of block codes is
preferred to a single block code for streaming sources.Comment: 23 pages, 1 table, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on
Communication
Coding in the Finite-Blocklength Regime: Bounds based on Laplace Integrals and their Asymptotic Approximations
In this paper we provide new compact integral expressions and associated
simple asymptotic approximations for converse and achievability bounds in the
finite blocklength regime. The chosen converse and random coding union bounds
were taken from the recent work of Polyanskyi-Poor-Verdu, and are investigated
under parallel AWGN channels, the AWGN channels, the BI-AWGN channel, and the
BSC. The technique we use, which is a generalization of some recent results
available from the literature, is to map the probabilities of interest into a
Laplace integral, and then solve (or approximate) the integral by use of a
steepest descent technique. The proposed results are particularly useful for
short packet lengths, where the normal approximation may provide unreliable
results.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures. Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Theory.
Matlab code available from http://dgt.dei.unipd.it section Download->Finite
Blocklength Regim
The Sphere Packing Bound via Augustin's Method
A sphere packing bound (SPB) with a prefactor that is polynomial in the block
length is established for codes on a length product channel
assuming that the maximum order Renyi capacity among the component
channels, i.e. , is . The
reliability function of the discrete stationary product channels with feedback
is bounded from above by the sphere packing exponent. Both results are proved
by first establishing a non-asymptotic SPB. The latter result continues to hold
under a milder stationarity hypothesis.Comment: 30 pages. An error in the statement of Lemma 2 is corrected. The
change is inconsequential for the rest of the pape
Noise in Quantum Information Processing
Quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement imbue quantum systems with information processing power in excess of their classical counterparts. These properties of quantum states are, however, highly fragile. As we enter the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, this vulnerability to noise is a major hurdle to the experimental realisation of quantum technologies. In this thesis we explore the role of noise in quantum information processing from two different perspectives. In Part I we consider noise from the perspective of quantum error correcting codes. Error correcting codes are often analysed with respect to simplified toy models of noise, such as iid depolarising noise. We consider generalising these techniques for analysing codes under more realistic noise models, including features such as biased or correlated errors. We also consider designing customised codes which not only take into account and exploit features of the underlying physical noise. Considering such tailored codes will be of particular importance for NISQ applications in which finite-size effects can be significant. In Part II we apply tools from information theory to study the finite-resource effects which arise in the trade-offs between resource costs and error rates for certain quantum information processing tasks. We start by considering classical communication over quantum channels, providing a refined analysis of the trade-off between communication rate and error in the regime of a finite number of channel uses. We then extend these techniques to the problem of resource interconversion in theories such as quantum entanglement and quantum thermodynamics, studying finite-size effects which arise in resource-error trade-offs. By studying this effect in detail, we also show how detrimental finite-size effects in devices such as thermal engines may be greatly suppressed by carefully engineering the underlying resource interconversion processes