One-way communication and error-correcting codes

Abstract

We establish a further connection between one-way communication where a sender conveys information to a receiver who has related information, and error-correction coding where a sender attempts to communicate reliably over a noisy channel. Using this connection we obtain three results on the two problems. We derive an often-tight lower bound on the number of bits required for one-way communication based on the largest code for the corresponding error-correction problem. We construct an error-correcting code whose minimum distance properties are similar to those of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes based on a one-way communication protocol for set reconciliation. Finally, we prove that one-way communication is suboptimal for a large class of Hamming-distance problems.