Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
We consider ensembles of binary linear error correcting codes, obtained by sampling each column of the generator matrix G or parity check matrix H independently from the set of all binary vectors of weight d (of appropriate dimension). We investigate the circumstances under which the mutual information between a randomly chosen codeword and the vector obtained after its transmission over a binary input memoryless symmetric channel (BIMSC) C is exactly n times the capacity of C, where n is the length of the code. For several channels such as the binary symmetric channel (BSC) and the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, we prove that the probability of this event has a threshold behaviour, depending on whether n/k is smaller than a certain quantity (that depends on the particular channel C and d), where k is the number of source bits. To show this, we prove a generalization of the following well-known theorem: the expectation of the size of the right kernel of G has a phase transition from 1 to infinity, depending on whether or not n/k is smaller than a certain quantity depending on the chosen ensemble.
Rüdiger Urbanke, Kirill Ivanov