Zero-Error Capacity of P-ary Shift Channels and FIFO Queues

Abstract

© 1963-2012 IEEE. The objects of study of this paper are communication channels in which the dominant type of noise are symbol shifts, the main motivating examples being timing and bit-shift channels. Two channel models are introduced and their zero-error capacities and zero-error-detection capacities determined by explicit constructions of optimal codes. Model A can be informally described as follows: 1) The information is stored in an n-cell register, where each cell is either empty or contains a particle of one of P possible types and 2) due to the imperfections of the device each of the particles may be shifted several cells away from its original position over time. Model B is an abstraction of a single-server queue: 1) The transmitter sends packets from a P-ary alphabet through a queuing system with an infinite buffer and a first-in-first-out service procedure and 2) each packet is being processed by the server for a random number of time slots. More general models including additional types of noise that the particles/packets can experience are also studied, as are the continuous-time versions of these problems.