No Arabic abstract
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 as the number of encoder outputs available at the eavesdropper is no more than a given threshold. First, the problem of encoding individual sources is studied. A precise characterization of the entire admissible rate region is established via a connection to the problem of secure coding over a three-layer wiretap network and utilizing some basic polyhedral structure of the admissible rate region. Building on this result, it is then shown that superposition coding remains optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate for the general secure SMDC problem.
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 coding is sum-rate optimal. Two joint coding strategies, which lead to rate savings compared to superposition coding, are proposed, where some coding components for one message can be used as the encryption key for another. By applying different variants of Hans inequality, we show that the lack of opportunity to apply these two coding strategies directly implies the optimality of superposition coding. It is further shown that under a set of particular security constraints, one of the proposed joint coding strategies can be used to construct a code that achieves the optimal rate region.
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 closed-form expressions of these uncountably many inequalities. Then we identify a finite subset of inequalities that is sufficient for characterizing the coding rate region. This gives an explicit characterization of the coding rate region. We further show by the symmetry of the problem that only a much smaller subset of this finite set of inequalities needs to be verified in determining the achievability of a given rate tuple. Yet, the cardinality of this smaller set grows at least exponentially fast with $L$. We also present a subset entropy inequality, which together with our explicit characterization of the coding rate region, is sufficient for proving the optimality of superposition coding.
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 discuss its superior packing efficiency when compared to Construction C.
We produce a series of results extending information-theoretical inequalities (discussed by Dembo--Cover--Thomas in 1989-1991) to a weighted version of entropy. The resulting inequalities involve the Gaussian weighted entropy; they imply a number of new relations for determinants of positive-definite matrices.