A Simple Converse of Burnashev's Reliability Function
Author(s)
Berlin, Peter; Nakiboglu, Baris; Rimoldi, Bixio; Telatar, Emre
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In a remarkable paper published in 1976, Burnashev determined the reliability function of variable-length block codes over discrete memoryless channels (DMCs) with feedback. Subsequently, an alternative achievability proof was obtained by Yamamoto and Itoh via a particularly simple and instructive scheme. Their idea is to alternate between a communication and a confirmation phase until the receiver detects the codeword used by the sender to acknowledge that the message is correct. We provide a converse that parallels the Yamamoto-Itoh achievability construction. Besides being simpler than the original, the proposed converse suggests that a communication and a confirmation phase are implicit in any scheme for which the probability of error decreases with the largest possible exponent. The proposed converse also makes it intuitively clear why the terms that appear in Burnashev's exponent are necessary.
Date issued
2009-06Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
Berlin, P. et al. “A Simple Converse of Burnashev's Reliability Function.” Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 55.7 (2009): 3074-3080. © 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Version: Final published version
Other identifiers
INSPEC Accession Number: 10705686
ISSN
0018-9448
Keywords
variable-length communication, reliability function, feedback, discrete memoryless channels (DMCs), Burnashev's error exponent