Coding for the $\boldsymbol \ell _\infty $ -Limited Permutation Channel

Abstract

We consider the communication of information in the presence of synchronization errors. Specifically, we consider permutation channels in which a transmitted codeword x = (x <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> , ... , x <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sub> ) is corrupted by a permutation π ∈ S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sub> to yield the received wordy = (y <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> , . . . , y <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sub> ), where y <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> = x <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">π(i)</sub> . We initiate the study of worst case (or zero-error) communication over permutation channels that distort the information by applying permutations π, which are limited to displacing any symbol by at most r locations, i.e., permutations π with weight at most r in the ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∞</sub> -metric. We present direct and recursive constructions, as well as bounds on the rate of such channels for binary and general alphabets. Specific attention is given to the case of r = 1.