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arXiv · 1104.0547

Joint Transmission and State Estimation: A Constrained Channel Coding Approach

Wenyi Zhang·Satish Vedantam·Urbashi Mitra
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Abstract

A scenario involving a source, a channel, and a destination, where the destination is interested in {\em both} reliably reconstructing the message transmitted by the source and estimating with a fidelity criterion the state of the channel, is considered. The source knows the channel statistics, but is oblivious to the actual channel state realization. Herein it is established that a distortion constraint for channel state estimation can be reduced to an additional cost constraint on the source input distribution, in the limit of large coding block length. A newly defined capacity-distortion function thus characterizes the fundamental tradeoff between transmission rate and state estimation distortion. It is also shown that non-coherent communication coupled with channel state estimation conditioned on treating the decoded message as training symbols achieves the capacity-distortion function. Among the various examples considered, the capacity-distortion function for a memoryless Rayleigh fading channel is characterized to within 1.443 bits at high signal-to-noise ratio. The constrained channel coding approach is also extended to multiple access channels, leading to a coupled cost constraint on the input distributions for the transmitting sources.

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Wenyi Zhang, Satish Vedantam, Urbashi Mitra. 2011-04-04. Joint Transmission and State Estimation: A Constrained Channel Coding Approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0547

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