On the Capacity of Write-Constrained Memories

Abstract

Rivest and Shamir introduced a write-once memory (WOM), a model of storage devices whose storage elements have restrictions on state transitions, and they presented some coding methods to reuse a WOM. An interesting question about a WOM is how efficiently we can reuse it with the best coding method, and as an answer to the question, Fu and Han Vinck determined the capacity of Fiat and Shamir’s generalized WOMs. In this paper, we extend their results, introducing write-constrained memories (WCMs) that consider state transition costs, and determining the capacity of WCMs under a certain type of cost constraints.