Ruslan Morozov

Ruslan Morozov, Tolga M. Duman

Particularly motivated by DNA storage channels, we consider channels with synchronization errors modeled as insertions and deletions, along with substitutions. We focus on the case where the synchronization error process has memory and investigate the information stability of these channels, hence the existence of their Shannon capacity. We assume that the synchronization errors are governed by a stationary and ergodic finite state Markov chain and prove that such a channel is information-stable, which implies the existence of a coding scheme that achieves the limit of mutual information. This result implies the existence of the Shannon capacity for a wide range of channels with synchronization errors, with different applications, including DNA storage. We also provide specific examples of deletion channels with Markov memory and numerically evaluate their capacity bounds, thereby allowing us to quantify the capacity difference between memoryless deletion channels and those with memory with the same deletion probability and reveal that having memory increases the channel capacity.

Ruslan Morozov, Tolga Mete Duman

We develop upper bounds on code size for an independent and identically distributed deletion and insertion channels for a given code length and target frame error probability. The bounds are obtained as a variation of a general converse bound, which, though available for any channel, is inefficient and not easily computable without a good reference distribution over the output alphabet. We obtain a reference output distribution for a general finite-input finite-output channel and provide a simple formula for the converse bound on the capacity employing this distribution. We then evaluate the bound for the deletion channel with a finite block length, and show that the resulting upper bound on the code size is tighter than that for a binary erasure channel, which is the only alternative converse bound for the finite-length setting. We also provide similar results for the insertion channel. Furthermore, we present a simple algorithm for computing an achievability bound for a general discrete-input discrete-output channel. Although the algorithm has exponential complexity, it is useful for comparison purposes.