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Scaling Exponent of List Decoders with Applications to Polar Codes

Related concepts (23)

In coding theory, decoding is the process of translating received messages into codewords of a given code. There have been many common methods of mapping messages to codewords. These are often used to recover messages sent over a noisy channel, such as a binary symmetric channel. is considered a binary code with the length ; shall be elements of ; and is the distance between those elements. One may be given the message , then ideal observer decoding generates the codeword .

Binary symmetric channel

A binary symmetric channel (or BSCp) is a common communications channel model used in coding theory and information theory. In this model, a transmitter wishes to send a bit (a zero or a one), and the receiver will receive a bit. The bit will be "flipped" with a "crossover probability" of p, and otherwise is received correctly. This model can be applied to varied communication channels such as telephone lines or disk drive storage.

Block code

In coding theory, block codes are a large and important family of error-correcting codes that encode data in blocks. There is a vast number of examples for block codes, many of which have a wide range of practical applications. The abstract definition of block codes is conceptually useful because it allows coding theorists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to study the limitations of all block codes in a unified way.

Information theory

Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. The field, in applied mathematics, is at the intersection of probability theory, statistics, computer science, statistical mechanics, information engineering, and electrical engineering. A key measure in information theory is entropy.

Linear code

In coding theory, a linear code is an error-correcting code for which any linear combination of codewords is also a codeword. Linear codes are traditionally partitioned into block codes and convolutional codes, although turbo codes can be seen as a hybrid of these two types. Linear codes allow for more efficient encoding and decoding algorithms than other codes (cf. syndrome decoding). Linear codes are used in forward error correction and are applied in methods for transmitting symbols (e.g.

Channel capacity

Channel capacity, in electrical engineering, computer science, and information theory, is the tight upper bound on the rate at which information can be reliably transmitted over a communication channel. Following the terms of the noisy-channel coding theorem, the channel capacity of a given channel is the highest information rate (in units of information per unit time) that can be achieved with arbitrarily small error probability. Information theory, developed by Claude E.

Binary erasure channel

In coding theory and information theory, a binary erasure channel (BEC) is a communications channel model. A transmitter sends a bit (a zero or a one), and the receiver either receives the bit correctly, or with some probability receives a message that the bit was not received ("erased") . A binary erasure channel with erasure probability is a channel with binary input, ternary output, and probability of erasure . That is, let be the transmitted random variable with alphabet .

Communication channel

A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.

Error correction code

In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, forward error correction (FEC) or channel coding is a technique used for controlling errors in data transmission over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea is that the sender encodes the message in a redundant way, most often by using an error correction code or error correcting code (ECC). The redundancy allows the receiver not only to detect errors that may occur anywhere in the message, but often to correct a limited number of errors.

Linear network coding

In computer networking, linear network coding is a program in which intermediate nodes transmit data from source nodes to sink nodes by means of linear combinations. Linear network coding may be used to improve a network's throughput, efficiency, and scalability, as well as reducing attacks and eavesdropping. The nodes of a network take several packets and combine for transmission. This process may be used to attain the maximum possible information flow in a network.

Hamming distance

In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings of equal length is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different. In other words, it measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other. In a more general context, the Hamming distance is one of several string metrics for measuring the edit distance between two sequences.

Low-density parity-check code

In information theory, a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code is a linear error correcting code, a method of transmitting a message over a noisy transmission channel. An LDPC code is constructed using a sparse Tanner graph (subclass of the bipartite graph). LDPC codes are , which means that practical constructions exist that allow the noise threshold to be set very close to the theoretical maximum (the Shannon limit) for a symmetric memoryless channel.

Repetition code

In coding theory, the repetition code is one of the most basic linear error-correcting codes. In order to transmit a message over a noisy channel that may corrupt the transmission in a few places, the idea of the repetition code is to just repeat the message several times. The hope is that the channel corrupts only a minority of these repetitions. This way the receiver will notice that a transmission error occurred since the received data stream is not the repetition of a single message, and moreover, the receiver can recover the original message by looking at the received message in the data stream that occurs most often.

Heat capacity

Heat capacity or thermal capacity is a physical property of matter, defined as the amount of heat to be supplied to an object to produce a unit change in its temperature. The SI unit of heat capacity is joule per kelvin (J/K). Heat capacity is an extensive property. The corresponding intensive property is the specific heat capacity, found by dividing the heat capacity of an object by its mass. Dividing the heat capacity by the amount of substance in moles yields its molar heat capacity.

Noisy-channel coding theorem

In information theory, the noisy-channel coding theorem (sometimes Shannon's theorem or Shannon's limit), establishes that for any given degree of noise contamination of a communication channel, it is possible to communicate discrete data (digital information) nearly error-free up to a computable maximum rate through the channel. This result was presented by Claude Shannon in 1948 and was based in part on earlier work and ideas of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley.

Turbo code

In information theory, turbo codes (originally in French Turbocodes) are a class of high-performance forward error correction (FEC) codes developed around 1990–91, but first published in 1993. They were the first practical codes to closely approach the maximum channel capacity or Shannon limit, a theoretical maximum for the code rate at which reliable communication is still possible given a specific noise level. Turbo codes are used in 3G/4G mobile communications (e.g.

Scale invariance

In physics, mathematics and statistics, scale invariance is a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energy, or other variables, are multiplied by a common factor, and thus represent a universality. The technical term for this transformation is a dilatation (also known as dilation). Dilatations can form part of a larger conformal symmetry. In mathematics, scale invariance usually refers to an invariance of individual functions or curves.

Critical exponent

Critical exponents describe the behavior of physical quantities near continuous phase transitions. It is believed, though not proven, that they are universal, i.e. they do not depend on the details of the physical system, but only on some of its general features. For instance, for ferromagnetic systems, the critical exponents depend only on: the dimension of the system the range of the interaction the spin dimension These properties of critical exponents are supported by experimental data.

Edit distance

In computational linguistics and computer science, edit distance is a string metric, i.e. a way of quantifying how dissimilar two strings (e.g., words) are to one another, that is measured by counting the minimum number of operations required to transform one string into the other. Edit distances find applications in natural language processing, where automatic spelling correction can determine candidate corrections for a misspelled word by selecting words from a dictionary that have a low distance to the word in question.

Levenshtein distance

In information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other. It is named after the Soviet mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965.