Second-Order Asymptotics for Communication Under Strong Asynchronism

Abstract

The capacity under strong asynchronism was recently shown to be essentially unaffected by the imposed decoding delay—the elapsed time between when information is available at the transmitter and when it is decoded—and the output sampling rate. This paper shows that, in contrast with capacity, the second-order term in the maximum rate expansion is sensitive to both parameters. When the receiver must locate the sent codeword exactly and therefore achieve minimum delay equal to the blocklength $n$ , the second-order term in the maximum rate expansion is of order $\Theta (1/\rho)$ for any sampling rate $\rho =O(1/\sqrt {n})$ (and $\rho =\omega (1/n)$ for otherwise reliable communication is impossible). Instead, if $\rho =\omega (1/\sqrt {n})$ , then the second-order term is the same as under full sampling and is given by a standard $\Theta (\sqrt {n})$ term. However, if the delay constraint is only slightly relaxed to $n(1+o(1))$ , then the above order transition (for $\rho =O(1/\sqrt {n})$ and $\rho =\omega (1/\sqrt {n})$ ) vanishes and the second-order term remains the same as under full sampling for any $\rho =\omega (1/n)$ .