We consider asynchronous communication over point-to-point discrete
memoryless channels. The transmitter starts sending one block codeword at an
instant that is uniformly distributed within a certain time period, which
represents the level of asynchronism. The receiver, by means of a sequential
decoder, must isolate the message without knowing when the codeword
transmission starts but being cognizant of the asynchronism level A. We are
interested in how quickly can the receiver isolate the sent message,
particularly in the regime where A is exponentially larger than the codeword
length N, which we refer to as `strong asynchronism.'
This model of sparse communication may represent the situation of a sensor
that remains idle most of the time and, only occasionally, transmits
information to a remote base station which needs to quickly take action.
The first result shows that vanishing error probability can be guaranteed as
N tends to infinity while A grows as Exp(N*k) if and only if k does not exceed
the `synchronization threshold,' a constant that admits a simple closed form
expression, and is at least as large as the capacity of the synchronized
channel. The second result is the characterization of a set of achievable
strictly positive rates in the regime where A is exponential in N, and where
the rate is defined with respect to the expected delay between the time
information starts being emitted until the time the receiver makes a decision.
As an application of the first result we consider antipodal signaling over a
Gaussian channel and derive a simple necessary condition between A, N, and SNR
for achieving reliable communication.Comment: 26 page