Symmetrical multilevel diversity coding (SMDC) is a classical model for coding over distributed storage. In this setting, a simple separate encoding strategy known as superposition coding was shown to be optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate (Roche, Yeung, and Hau, 1997) and the entire admissible rate region (Yeung and Zhang, 1999) of the problem. The proofs utilized carefully constructed induction arguments, for which the classical subset entropy inequality of Han (1978) played a key role. This paper includes two parts. In the first part the existing optimality proofs for classical SMDC are revisited, with a focus on their connections to subset entropy inequalities. First, a new sliding-window subset entropy inequality is introduced and then used to establish the optimality of superposition coding for achieving the minimum sum rate under a weaker source-reconstruction requirement. Second, a subset entropy inequality recently proved by Madiman and Tetali (2010) is used to develop a new structural understanding to the proof of Yeung and Zhang on the optimality of superposition coding for achieving the entire admissible rate region. Building on the connections between classical SMDC and the subset entropy inequalities developed in the first part, in the second part the optimality of superposition coding is further extended to the cases where there is either an additional all-access encoder (SMDC-A) or an additional secrecy constraint (S-SMDC).
Symmetrical Multilevel Diversity Coding (SMDC) is a network compression problem introduced by Roche (1992) and Yeung (1995). In this setting, a simple separate coding strategy known as superposition coding was shown to be optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate (Roche, Yeung, and Hau, 1997) and the entire admissible rate region (Yeung and Zhang, 1999) of the problem. This paper considers a natural generalization of SMDC to the secure communication setting with an additional eavesdropper. It is required that all sources need to be kept perfectly secret from the eavesdropper as long a…
The problem of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration is considered in this work. Two new outer bounds on the optimal tradeoffs between the normalized storage capacity and repair bandwidth are established, by which the optimality of separate coding at the minimum-bandwidth-regeneration (MBR) point follows immediately. This resolves a question left open in a previous work by Tian and Liu.
The problem of multilevel diversity coding with secure regeneration (MDC-SR) is considered, which includes the problems of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration (MDC-R) and secure regenerating code (SRC) as special cases. Two outer bounds are established, showing that separate coding of different messages using the respective SRCs can achieve the minimum-bandwidth-regeneration (MBR) point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff regions for the general MDC-SR problem. The core of the new converse results is an exchange lemma, which can be established usin…
We investigate techniques for designing modulation/coding schemes for the wireless two-way relaying channel. The relay is assumed to have perfect channel state information, but the transmitters are assumed to have no channel state information. We consider physical layer network coding based on multilevel coding techniques. Our multilevel coding framework is inspired by the compute-and-forward relaying protocol. Indeed, we show that the framework developed here naturally facilitates decoding of linear combinations of codewords for forwarding by the relay node. We develop our framework with gene…
In distributed multilevel diversity coding, $K$ correlated sources (each with $K$ components) are encoded in a distributed manner such that, given the outputs from any $α$ encoders, the decoder can reconstruct the first $α$ components of each of the corresponding $α$ sources. For this problem, the optimality of a multilayer Slepian-Wolf coding scheme based on binning and superposition is established when $K\leq 3$. The same conclusion is shown to hold for general $K$ under a certain symmetry condition, which generalizes a celebrated result by Yeung and Zhang.
We present a general framework for studying the multilevel structure of lattice network coding (LNC), which serves as the theoretical fundamental for solving the ring-based LNC problem in practice, with greatly reduced decoding complexity. Building on the framework developed, we propose a novel lattice-based network coding solution, termed layered integer forcing (LIF), which applies to any lattices having multilevel structure. The theoretic foundations of the developed multilevel framework lead to a new general lattice construction approach, the elementary divisor construction (EDC), which sh…
Multilevel diversity coding is a classical coding model where multiple mutually independent information messages are encoded, such that different reliability requirements can be afforded to different messages. It is well known that {\em superposition coding}, namely separately encoding the independent messages, is optimal for symmetric multilevel diversity coding (SMDC) (Yeung-Zhang 1999). In the current paper, we consider weakly secure SMDC where security constraints are injected on each individual message, and provide a complete characterization of the conditions under which superposition co…
A framework is proposed that allows for a joint description and optimization of both binary polar coding and the multilevel coding (MLC) approach for $2^m$-ary digital pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM). The conceptual equivalence of polar coding and multilevel coding is pointed out in detail. Based on a novel characterization of the channel polarization phenomenon, rules for the optimal choice of the bit labeling in this coded modulation scheme employing polar codes are developed. Simulation results for the AWGN channel are included.
Lattice and special nonlattice multilevel constellations constructed from binary codes, such as Constructions A, C, and D, have relevant applications in Mathematics (sphere packing) and in Communication (multi-stage decoding and efficient vector quantization). In this work, we explore some properties of Construction C, in particular its geometric uniformity. We then propose a new multilevel construction, inspired by bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM), that we call Construction C*. We investigate the geometric uniformity, laticeness, and minimum distance properties of Construction C* and d…
It is well known that {\em superposition coding}, namely separately encoding the independent sources, is optimal for symmetric multilevel diversity coding (SMDC) (Yeung-Zhang 1999). However, the characterization of the coding rate region therein involves uncountably many linear inequalities and the constant term (i.e., the lower bound) in each inequality is given in terms of the solution of a linear optimization problem. Thus this implicit characterization of the coding rate region does not enable the determination of the achievability of a given rate tuple. In this paper, we first obtain clos…
We consider the asymmetric multilevel diversity (A-MLD) coding problem, where a set of $2^K-1$ information sources, ordered in a decreasing level of importance, is encoded into $K$ messages (or descriptions). There are $2^K-1$ decoders, each of which has access to a non-empty subset of the encoded messages. Each decoder is required to reproduce the information sources up to a certain importance level depending on the combination of descriptions available to it. We obtain a single letter characterization of the achievable rate region for the 3-description problem. In contrast to symmetric multi…
The problem of multilevel diversity coding with secure regeneration is revisited. Under the assumption that the eavesdropper can access the repair data for all compromised storage nodes, Shao el al. provided a precise characterization of the minimum-bandwidth-regeneration (MBR) point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff region. In this paper, it is shown that the MBR point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff region remains the same even if we assume that the eavesdropper can access the repair data for some compromised stora…
We address the problem of constructing of coding schemes for the channels with high-order modulations. It is known, that non-binary LDPC codes are especially good for such channels and significantly outperform their binary counterparts. Unfortunately, their decoding complexity is still large. In order to reduce the decoding complexity we consider multilevel coding schemes based on non-binary LDPC codes (NB-LDPC-MLC schemes) over smaller fields. The use of such schemes gives us a reasonable gain in complexity. At the same time the performance of NB-LDPC-MLC schemes is practically the same as th…
Fourier Transform Interferometry (FTI) is an interferometric procedure for acquiring HyperSpectral (HS) data. Recently, it has been observed that the light source highlighting a (biologic) sample can be coded before the FTI acquisition in a procedure called Coded Illumination-FTI (CI-FTI). This turns HS data reconstruction into a Compressive Sensing (CS) problem regularized by the sparsity of the HS data. CI-FTI combines the high spectral resolution of FTI with the advantages of reduced-light-exposure imaging in biology. In this paper, we leverage multilevel sampling scheme recently developed …
Digital contents in large scale distributed storage systems may have different reliability and access delay requirements, and for this reason, erasure codes with different strengths need to be utilized to achieve the best storage efficiency. At the same time, in such large scale distributed storage systems, nodes fail on a regular basis, and the contents stored on them need to be regenerated and stored on other healthy nodes, the efficiency of which is an important factor affecting the overall quality of service. In this work, we formulate the problem of multilevel diversity coding with regene…
We consider the design of coding schemes for the wireless two-way relaying channel when there is no channel state information at the transmitter. In the spirit of the compute and forward paradigm, we present a multilevel coding scheme that permits computation (or, decoding) of a class of functions at the relay. The function to be computed (or, decoded) is then chosen depending on the channel realization. We define such a class of functions which can be decoded at the relay using the proposed coding scheme and derive rates that are universally achievable over a set of channel gains when this cl…
Compress-forward (CF) relays can improve communication rates even when the relay cannot decode the source signal. Efficient implementation of CF is a topic of contemporary interest, in part because of its potential impact on wireless technologies such as cloud-RAN. There exists a gap between the performance of CF implementations in the high spectral efficiency regime and the corresponding information theoretic achievable rates. We begin by re-framing a dilemma causing this gap, and propose an approach for its mitigation. We utilize trellis coded quantization (TCQ) at the relay together with mu…
In this paper, a two-hop network in which information is transmitted from a source via a relay to a destination is considered. It is assumed that the channels are static fading with additive white Gaussian noise. All nodes are equipped with a single antenna and the Channel State Information (CSI) of each hop is not available at the corresponding transmitter. The relay is assumed to be simple, i.e., not capable of data buffering over multiple coding blocks, water-filling over time, or rescheduling. A commonly used design criterion in such configurations is the maximization of the average receiv…
Slow fading broadcast channels can model a wide range of applications in wireless networks. Due to delay requirements and the unavailability of the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), these channels for many applications are non-ergodic. The appropriate measure for designing signals in non-ergodic channels is the outage probability. In this paper, we provide a method to optimize STBCs based on the outage probability at moderate SNRs. Multilevel polar coded-modulation is a new class of coded-modulation techniques that benefits from low complexity decoders and simple rate matchi…
We develop a low-complexity coding scheme to achieve covert communications over binary-input discrete memoryless channels (BI-DMCs). We circumvent the impossibility of covert communication with linear codes by introducing non-linearity through the use of pulse position modulation (PPM) and multilevel coding (MLC). We show that the MLC-PPM scheme exhibits many appealing properties; in particular, the channel at a given index level remains stationary as the number of level increases, which allows one to use families of channel capacity- and channel resolvability-achieving codes to concretely ins…
This paper investigates the design and application of write-once memory (WOM) codes for flash memory storage. Using ideas from Merkx ('84), we present a construction of WOM codes based on finite Euclidean geometries over $\mathbb{F}_2$. This construction yields WOM codes with new parameters and provides insight into the criterion that incidence structures should satisfy to give rise to good codes. We also analyze methods of adapting binary WOM codes for use on multilevel flash cells. In particular, we give two strategies based on different rewrite objectives. A brief discussion of the average-…
The rate regions of multilevel diversity coding systems (MDCS), a sub-class of the broader family of multi-source multi-sink networks with special structure, are investigated. After showing how to enumerate all non-isomorphic MDCS instances of a given size, the Shannon outer bound and several achievable inner bounds based on linear codes are given for the rate region of each non-isomorphic instance. For thousands of MDCS instances, the bounds match, and hence exact rate regions are proven. Results gained from these computations are summarized in key statistics involving aspects such as the suf…
A framework is proposed that allows for a joint description and optimization of both binary polar coding and $2^m$-ary digital pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) schemes such as multilevel coding (MLC) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). The conceptual equivalence of polar coding and multilevel coding is pointed out in detail. Based on a novel characterization of the channel polarization phenomenon, rules for the optimal choice of the labeling in coded modulation schemes employing polar codes are developed. Simulation results regarding the error performance of the proposed schemes on th…
The performance of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) with bit shaping (i.e., non-equiprobable bit probabilities in the underlying binary code) is studied. For the Gaussian channel, the rates achievable with BICM and bit shaping are practically identical to those of coded modulation or multilevel coding. This identity holds for the whole range of values of signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, the random coding error exponent of BICM significantly exceeds that of multilevel coding and is very close to that of coded modulation.
This paper studies spatial diversity techniques applied to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) diffusion-based molecular communications (DBMC). Two types of spatial coding techniques, namely Alamouti-type coding and repetition MIMO coding are suggested and analyzed. In addition, we consider receiver-side equal-gain combining, which is equivalent to maximum-ratio combining in symmetrical scenarios. For numerical analysis, the channel impulse responses of a symmetrical $2 \times 2$ MIMO-DBMC system are acquired by a trained artificial neural network. It is demonstrated that spatial diversity h…
The capacity of the AWGN broadcast channel is achieved by superposition coding, but superposition of individual coded modulations expands the modulation alphabet and distorts its configuration. Coded modulation over a broadcast channel subject to a specific channel-input modulation constraint remains an important open problem. Some progress has been made in the related area of unequal-error protection modulations which can be considered single-user broadcast transmission, but it does not approach all points on the boundary of the capacity region. This paper studies broadcast coded modulation u…
In this letter, we propose a progressive rate-filling method as a framework to study agile construction of multilevel polar-coded modulation. We show that the bit indices within each component polar code can follow a fixed, precomputed ranking sequence, e.g., the Polar sequence in the 5G standard, while their allocated rates (i.e., the number of information bits of each component polar code) can be fast computed by exploiting the target sum-rate approximation and proper rate-filling methods. In particular, we develop two rate-filling strategies based on the capacity and the rate considering th…
We consider the distributed source coding system for $L$ correlated Gaussian observations $Y_i, i=1,2, ..., L$. Let $X_i,i=1,2, ..., L$ be $L$ correlated Gaussian random variables and $N_i,$ $i=1,2,... L$ be independent additive Gaussian noises also independent of $X_i, i=1,2,..., L$. We consider the case where for each $i=1,2,..., L$, $Y_i$ is a noisy observation of $X_i$, that is, $Y_i=X_i+N_i$. On this coding system the determination problem of the rate distortion region remains open. In this paper, we derive explicit outer and inner bounds of the rate distortion region. We further find an …
Diversity-Multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) is a coarse high SNR approximation of the fundamental tradeoff between data rate and reliability in a slow fading channel. In this paper, we characterize the fundamental DMT of the two user single antenna Gaussian interference channel. We show that the class of multilevel superposition coding schemes universally achieves (for all fading statistics) the DMT for the two-user interference channel. For the special case of symmetric DMT, when the two users have identical rate and diversity gain requirements, we characterize the DMT achieved by the Han-Kobayashi…
In this work, spatial diversity techniques in the area of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) diffusion-based molecular communications (DBMC) are investigated. For transmitter-side spatial coding, Alamouti-type coding and repetition MIMO coding are proposed and analyzed. At the receiver-side, selection diversity, equal-gain combining, and maximum-ratio combining are studied as combining strategies. Throughout the numerical analysis, a symmetrical $2\times 2$ MIMO-DBMC system is assumed. Furthermore, a trained artificial neural network is utilized to acquire the channel impulse responses. The…
Consider a generalized multiterminal source coding system, where $\ell\choose m$ encoders, each observing a distinct size-$m$ subset of $\ell$ ($\ell\geq 2$) zero-mean unit-variance symmetrically correlated Gaussian sources with correlation coefficient $ρ$, compress their observations in such a way that a joint decoder can reconstruct the sources within a prescribed mean squared error distortion based on the compressed data. The optimal rate-distortion performance of this system was previously known only for the two extreme cases $m=\ell$ (the centralized case) and $m=1$ (the distributed case)…
