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We consider the problem of communicating over a channel that randomly “tears” the message block into small pieces of different sizes and shuffles them. For the binary torn-paper channel with block length $n$ and pieces of length ${\mathrm{ Geometric}}(p_{n})$ , we characterize the capacity as $C = e^{-\alpha }$ , where $\alpha = \lim _{n\to \infty } p_{n} \log n$. Our results show that the case of ${\mathrm{ Geometric}}(p_{n})$ -length fragments and the case of deterministic length- $(1/p_{n})$ fragments are qualitatively different and, surprisingly, the capacity of the former is larger. Intuitively, this is due to the fact that, in the random fragments case, large fragments are sometimes observed, which boosts the capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes achieving or nearly achieving the Singleton bound are interesting in both theory and practice. The objective of this paper is to construct several infinite families of MDS, near MDS and almost MDS codes from some special cyclic subgroups of ${\mathbb {F}}_{q^{2}}^{*}$. To this end, the augmentation and extension techniques are used. The codes in this paper have flexible parameters and their lengths could be large. The minimum linear locality of the codes constructed in this paper is also studied. Some infinite families of optimal linearly locally recoverable codes are obtained. Besides, some codes in this paper are proved to be proper for error detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number-theoretic code is a class of codes defined by single or multiple congruences. These codes are mainly used for correcting insertion and deletion errors, and for correcting asymmetric errors. This paper presents a formula for a generalization of the complete weight enumerator for the number-theoretic codes. This formula allows us to derive the weight enumerators and cardinalities for the number-theoretic codes. As a special case, this paper provides the Hamming weight enumerators and cardinalities of the non-binary Tenengolts’ codes, correcting single insertion or deletion. Moreover, we show that the formula deduces the MacWilliams identity for the linear codes over the ring of integers modulo $r$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes using the uncertainty of information (UoI), measured by Shannon’s entropy, as a metric for information freshness. We consider a system in which a central monitor observes M binary Markov processes through m communication channels (m

Recently, subfield codes of geometric codes over large finite fields ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ with dimension 3 and 4 were studied and distance-optimal subfield codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ were obtained, where $q=p^{m}$. The key idea for obtaining very good subfield codes over small fields is to choose very good linear codes over an extension field with small dimension. This paper first presents a general construction of $[q+1, 2, q]$ MDS codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ , and then studies the subfield codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ of some of the $[q+1, 2,q]$ MDS codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$. Two families of dimension-optimal codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ are obtained, and several families of nearly optimal codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p)$ are produced. Several open problems are also proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes with few weights have applications in consumer electronics, communications, data storage systems, secret sharing, authentication codes, and association schemes. As a special class of linear codes, minimal linear codes have important applications in secret sharing and secure computation of data between two parties. The construction of minimal linear codes with new and desirable parameters is an interesting research topic in coding theory and cryptography. Recently, Mesnager et.al. stated that “constructing linear codes with good parameters from non-weakly regular bent functions is an interesting problem.” The goal of this paper is to construct linear codes with two or three weights from non-weakly regular bent functions over finite fields and analyze the minimality of the constructed linear codes. In doing so, we draw inspiration from a paper by Mesnager in which she constructed linear codes with small weights from weakly regular bent functions based on a generic construction method. First, we recall the definitions of the subsets $B_{+}(f)$ and $B_{-}(f)$ associated with a non-weakly regular bent function $f$. Next, we construct two- or three-weight linear $p$ -ary codes on these sets using duals of the non-weakly regular bent functions that are also bent. We note that the constructed linear codes are minimal in almost all cases. Moreover, when $f$ is a non-weakly regular bent function in a certain subclass of Generalized Maiorana-McFarland bent functions, we determine the weight distributions of the corresponding linear codes. As far as we know, the construction of linear codes from non-weakly regular bent functions over finite fields is first studied in the literature by the second author in his dissertation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caching is an efficient way to reduce network traffic congestion during peak hours by storing some content at the users’ local caches. For the shared-link network with end-user-caches, Maddah-Ali and Niesen proposed a two-phase coded caching strategy. In practice, users may communicate with the server through intermediate relays. This paper studies the tradeoff between the memory size ${\mathsf M}$ and the network load ${\mathsf R}$ for the networks where a server with ${\mathsf N}$ files is connected to ${\mathsf H}$ relays (without caches), which in turn are connected to ${\mathsf K}$ users equipped with caches of ${\mathsf M}$ files. When each user is connected to a different subset of ${\mathsf r}$ relays, i.e., ${\mathsf K}= \binom {\mathsf H}{\mathsf r}$ , the system is referred to as a combination network with end-user-caches. In this work, converse bounds are derived for the practically motivated case of uncoded cache contents, that is, bits of the various files are directly pushed into the user caches without any coding. In this case, once the cache contents and the users’ demands are known, the problem reduces to a general index coding problem. This paper shows that relying on a well-known “acyclic index coding converse bound” results in converse bounds that are not tight for combination networks with end-user-caches. A novel converse bound that leverages the network topology is proposed, which is the tightest converse bound known to date. As a result of independent interest, an inequality that generalizes the well-known sub-modularity of entropy is derived. Several novel caching schemes are proposed, based on the Maddah-Ali and Niesen cache placement. These schemes leverage the structure of the combination network or/and perform interference elimination at the end-users. The proposed schemes are proved: (i) to be (order) optimal for some $({\mathsf N}, {\mathsf M}, {\mathsf H}, {\mathsf r})$ parameters regimes under the constraint of uncoded cache placement, and (ii) to outperform the state-of-the-art schemes in numerical evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursley and Sarwate established a lower bound on a combined measure of autocorrelation and crosscorrelation for a pair $(f,g)$ of binary sequences (i.e., sequences with terms in {−1, 1}). If $f$ is a nonzero sequence, then its autocorrelation demerit factor, $\text {ADF}(f)$ , is the sum of the squared magnitudes of the aperiodic autocorrelation values over all nonzero shifts for the sequence obtained by normalizing $f$ to have unit Euclidean norm. If $(f,g)$ is a pair of nonzero sequences, then their crosscorrelation demerit factor, $\text {CDF}(f,g)$ , is the sum of the squared magnitudes of the aperiodic crosscorrelation values over all shifts for the sequences obtained by normalizing both $f$ and $g$ to have unit Euclidean norm. Pursley and Sarwate showed that for binary sequences, the sum of $\text {CDF}(f,g)$ and the geometric mean of $\text {ADF}(f)$ and $\text {ADF}{(g)}$ must be at least 1. For randomly selected pairs of long binary sequences, this quantity is typically around 2. In this paper, we show that Pursley and Sarwate’s bound is met for binary sequences precisely when $(f,g)$ is a Golay complementary pair. We also prove a generalization of this result for sequences whose terms are arbitrary complex numbers. We investigate constructions that produce infinite families of Golay complementary pairs, and compute the asymptotic values of autocorrelation and crosscorrelation demerit factors for such families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topological interference management (TIM) problem refers to the study of the $K$ -user partially connected interference networks with no channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT), except for the knowledge of network topology. In this paper, we study the TIM problem with confidential messages (TIM-CM), where message confidentiality must be satisfied in addition to reliability constraints. In particular, each transmitted message must be decodable at its intended receiver and remain confidential at the remaining $(K-1)$ receivers. Our main contribution is to present a comprehensive set of results for the TIM-CM problem by studying the symmetric secure degrees of freedom (SDoF). To this end, we first characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for feasibility of positive symmetric SDoF for any arbitrary topology. We next present two achievable schemes for the TIM-CM problem: For the first scheme, we use the concept of secure partition and, for the second one, we use the concept of secure independent sets. We also present outer bounds on symmetric SDoF for any arbitrary network topology. Using these bounds, we characterize the optimal symmetric SDoF of all $K=2$ -user and $K=3$ -user network topologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity are important cryptographic primitives in some stream ciphers. In this paper, two methodologies for constructing minimal binary codes from sets, Boolean functions and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity, are proposed. More precisely, a general construction of new minimal codes using minimal codes contained in Reed-Muller codes and sets without nonzero low degree annihilators is presented. The other construction allows us to yield minimal codes from certain subcodes of Reed-Muller codes and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity. Via these general constructions, infinite families of minimal binary linear codes of dimension $m$ and length less than or equal to $m(m+1)/2$ are obtained. Besides, a lower bound on the minimum distance of the proposed minimal linear codes is established. Conjectures and open problems are also presented. The results of this paper show that Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity have nice applications in several fields additionally to symmetric cryptography, such as coding theory and secret sharing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two general constructions of linear codes with functions over finite fields have been extensively studied in the literature. The first one is given by C(ƒ) = {Tr(aƒ(x) + bx)x∈Fqm*: a, b ∈ Fqm}, where q is a prime power, Fqm* = Fqm \ {0}, Tr is the trace function from Fqm to Fq, and ƒ(x) is a function from Fqm to Fqm with ƒ(0) = 0. Almost bent functions, quadratic functions and some monomials on F2m were used in the first construction, and many families of binary linear codes with few weights were obtained in the literature. This paper studies some punctured codes of these binary codes. Several families of binary linear codes with few weights and new parameters are obtained in this paper. Several families of distance-optimal binary linear codes with new parameters are also produced in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The puncturing and shortening techniques are two important approaches to constructing new linear codes from old ones. In the past 70 years, a lot of progress on the puncturing technique has been made, and many works on punctured linear codes have been done. Many families of linear codes with interesting parameters have been obtained with the puncturing technique. However, little research on the shortening technique has been done and there are only a handful references on shortened linear codes. The first objective of this paper is to prove some general theory for shortened linear codes. The second objective is to study some shortened codes of the Hamming codes, Simplex codes, some Reed-Muller codes, and ovoid codes. Eleven families of optimal shortened codes over finite fields are presented in this paper. As a byproduct, five infinite families of 2-designs are also constructed from some of the shortened codes presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide the left and right Parseval relations over the quaternions. Moreover, we construct a new infinite family of sequences almost over $Q_{8} $ with period $p$ by a generalization of Legendre mapping, where $p\equiv 1 \pmod {8}$ is prime and the sequences have ideal autocorrelation. The sequences are symmetric when $p\equiv 1 \pmod {16}$ , and antisymmetric when $p\equiv 9 \pmod {16} $. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works on age of information and erasure channels have dealt with specific models and computed the average age or average peak age for certain settings. In this paper, given a source that produces a letter every $T_{s}$ seconds and an erasure channel that can be used every $T_{c}$ seconds, we ask what is the coding strategy that minimizes the time-average “age of information” that an observer of the channel output incurs. We first analyze the case where the source alphabet and the channel-input alphabet have the same size. We show that a trivial coding strategy is optimal and a closed form expression for the age can be derived. We then analyze the case where the alphabets have different sizes. We use a random coding argument to bound the average age and show that the average age achieved using random codes converges to the optimal average age of linear block codes as the source alphabet becomes large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to their seemingly simple and shared structure of independence and stationarity, Lévy processes exhibit a wide variety of behaviors, from the self-similar Wiener process to piecewise-constant compound Poisson processes. Inspired by the recent paper of Ghourchian, Amini, and Gohari, we characterize their compressibility by studying the entropy of their double discretization (both in time and amplitude) in the regime of vanishing discretization steps. For a Lévy process with absolutely continuous marginals, this reduces to understanding the asymptotics of the differential entropy of its marginals at small times, for which we obtain a new local central limit theorem. We generalize known results for stable processes to the non-stable case, with a special focus on Lévy processes that are locally self-similar, and conceptualize a new compressibility hierarchy of Lévy processes, captured by their Blumenthal–Getoor index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In high-dimensional sparse regression, would increasing the signal-to-noise ratio while fixing the sparsity level always lead to better model selection? For high-dimensional sparse regression problems, surprisingly, in this paper we answer this question in the negative in the regime of linear sparsity for the Lasso method, relying on a new concept we term effect size heterogeneity. Roughly speaking, a regression coefficient vector has high effect size heterogeneity if its nonzero entries have significantly different magnitudes. From the viewpoint of this new measure, we prove that the false and true positive rates achieve the optimal trade-off uniformly along the Lasso path when this measure is maximal in a certain sense, and the worst trade-off is achieved when it is minimal in the sense that all nonzero effect sizes are roughly equal. Moreover, we demonstrate that the first false selection occurs much earlier when effect size heterogeneity is minimal than when it is maximal. The underlying cause of these two phenomena is, metaphorically speaking, the “competition” among variables with effect sizes of the same magnitude in entering the model. Taken together, our findings suggest that effect size heterogeneity shall serve as an important complementary measure to the sparsity of regression coefficients in the analysis of high-dimensional regression problems. Our proofs use techniques from approximate message passing theory as well as a novel technique for estimating the rank of the first false variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tsallis and Rényi entropies, which are monotone transformations of each other, are deformations of the celebrated Shannon entropy. Maximization of these deformed entropies, under suitable constraints, leads to the $q$ -exponential family which has applications in non-extensive statistical physics, information theory and statistics. In previous information-geometric studies, the $q$ -exponential family was analyzed using classical convex duality and Bregman divergence. In this paper, we show that a generalized $\lambda $ -duality, where $\lambda = 1 - q$ is to be interpreted as the constant information-geometric curvature, leads to a generalized exponential family which is essentially equivalent to the $q$ -exponential family and has deep connections with Rényi entropy and optimal transport. Using this generalized convex duality and its associated logarithmic divergence, we show that our $\lambda $ -exponential family satisfies properties that parallel and generalize those of the exponential family. Under our framework, the Rényi entropy and divergence arise naturally, and we give a new proof of the Tsallis/Rényi entropy maximizing property of the $q$ -exponential family. We also introduce a $\lambda $ -mixture family which may be regarded as the dual of the $\lambda $ -exponential family, and connect it with other mixture-type families. Finally, we discuss a duality between the $\lambda $ -exponential family and the $\lambda $ -logarithmic divergence, and study its statistical consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the duals of generalized bent functions $f: V_{n}\rightarrow \mathbb {Z}_{p^{k}}$ , where $V_{n}$ is an $n$ -dimensional vector space over $\mathbb {F}_{p}$ and $p$ is an odd prime, $k$ is a positive integer. It is known that weakly regular generalized bent functions always appear in pairs since the dual of a weakly regular generalized bent function is also a weakly regular generalized bent function. The duals of non-weakly regular generalized bent functions can be generalized bent or not generalized bent. By generalizing the construction of Çeşmelioğlu et al., 2016, we provide an explicit construction of generalized bent functions whose duals can be generalized bent or not generalized bent. We show that the well-known direct sum construction and the generalized indirect sum construction given in Wang and Fu, 2021. can provide secondary constructions of generalized bent functions whose duals can be generalized bent or not generalized bent. By using the knowledge on ideal decomposition in cyclotomic fields, we prove that $f^{**}(x)=f(-x)$ if $f$ is a generalized bent function and its dual $f^{*}$ is also a generalized bent function. For any non-weakly regular generalized bent function $f$ which satisfies that $f(x)=f(-x)$ and its dual $f^{*}$ is generalized bent, we give a property and as a consequence, we prove that there is no self-dual generalized bent function $f: V_{n}\rightarrow \mathbb {Z}_{p^{k}}$ if $p\equiv 3 ~(mod ~4)$ and $n$ is odd. When $p \equiv 1 ~(mod ~4)$ or $p\equiv 3 ~(mod ~4)$ and $n$ is even, we give a secondary construction of self-dual generalized bent functions. In the end, by the decomposition of generalized bent functions, we characterize the relations between the generalized bentness of the dual of a generalized bent function $f$ and the bentness of the duals of bent functions associated with the generalized bent function $f$ , as well as the relations of self-duality between a generalized bent function $f$ and bent functions associated with the generalized bent function $f$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes new, simple, recursive methods of construction for orientable sequences, i.e. periodic binary sequences in which any $n$ -tuple occurs at most once in a period in either direction. As has been previously described, such sequences have potential applications in automatic position-location systems, where the sequence is encoded onto a surface and a reader needs only examine $n$ consecutive encoded bits to determine its location and orientation on the surface. The only previously described method of construction (due to Dai et al.) is somewhat complex, whereas the new techniques are simple to both describe and implement. The methods of construction cover both the standard ‘infinite periodic’ case, and also the aperiodic, finite sequence, case. Both the new methods build on the Lempel homomorphism, first introduced as a means of recursively generating de Bruijn sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tang and Ding [IEEE IT 67 (2021) 244-254] studied the class of BCH codes $\mathcal {C}_{(q,q+1,4,1)}$ and their dual codes with $q=2^{m}$ and established that the codewords of the minimum (or the second minimum) weight in these codes support 4-designs or 3-designs. Motivated by this, we further investigate the codewords of the next adjacent weight in such codes and discover more infinite classes of $t$ -designs with $t=3,4$. In particular, we prove that codewords of weight 7 in $\mathcal {C}_{(q,q+1,4,1)}$ support 4-designs for odd $m \geqslant 5$ and they support 3-designs for even $m \geqslant 4$ , which provide infinite classes of simple $t$ -designs with new parameters. Another significant class of $t$ -designs we produce in this paper has complementary designs with parameters 4- $(2^{2s+1}+ 1,5,5)$ ; these designs have the smallest index among all the known simple 4- $(q+1,5,\lambda)$ designs derived from codes for prime powers $q$ ; and they are further proved to be isomorphic to the 4-designs admitting the projective general linear group PGL $(2,2^{2s+1})$ as the automorphism group constructed by Alltop in 1969. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Langberg-Médard multiple unicast conjecture claims that for a strongly reachable $k$ -pair network, there exists a feasible multi-flow with rate $(1,1, {\dots },1)$. In this paper, we confirm the conjecture for $k=3$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the established notion of storage codes, we consider sets of infinite sequences over a finite alphabet such that every $k$ -tuple of consecutive entries is uniquely recoverable from its $l$ -neighborhood in the sequence. We address the problem of finding the maximum growth rate of the set, which we term capacity, as well as constructions of explicit families that approach the optimal rate. The techniques that we employ rely on the connection of this problem with constrained systems. In the second part of the paper we consider a modification of the problem wherein the entries in the sequence are viewed as random variables over a finite alphabet that follow some joint distribution, and the recovery condition requires that the Shannon entropy of the $k$ -tuple conditioned on its $l$ -neighborhood be bounded above by some $\epsilon >0$. We study properties of measures on infinite sequences that maximize the metric entropy under the recoverability condition. Drawing on tools from ergodic theory, we prove some properties of entropy-maximizing measures. We also suggest a procedure of constructing an $\epsilon $ -recoverable measure from a corresponding deterministic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1994, Jim Massey proposed the guessing entropy as a measure of the difficulty that an attacker has to guess a secret used in a cryptographic system, and established a well-known inequality between entropy and guessing entropy. Over 15 years before, in an unpublished work, he also established a well-known inequality for the entropy of an integer-valued random variable of given variance. In this paper, we establish a link between the two works by Massey in the more general framework of the relationship between discrete (absolute) entropy and continuous (differential) entropy. Two approaches are given in which the discrete entropy (or Rényi entropy) of an integer-valued variable can be upper bounded using the differential (Rényi) entropy of some suitably chosen continuous random variable. As an application, lower bounds on guessing entropy and guessing moments are derived in terms of entropy or Rényi entropy (without side information) and conditional entropy or Arimoto conditional entropy (when side information is available). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let $ \mathbb K$ be an algebraically closed field. In this paper, we consider the class of smooth plane curves of degree $n+1>3$ over $ \mathbb K$ , containing three points, $P_{1},P_{2}$ , and $P_{3}$ , such that $nP_{1}+P_{2}$ , $nP_{2}+P_{3}$ , and $nP_{3}+P_{1}$ are divisors cut out by three distinct lines. For such curves, we determine the dimension of certain special divisors supported on $\{P_{1},P_{2},P_{3}\}$ , as well as an explicit description of all pure gaps at each nonempty subset of the distinguished points $P_{1},P_{2}$ , and $P_{3}$. When $ \mathbb K=\overline { \mathbb F}_{q}$ , this class of curves, which includes the Hermitian curve, is used to construct algebraic geometry codes having minimum distance better than the Goppa bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new family of codes, called clustering-correcting codes, is presented in this paper. This family of codes is motivated by the special structure of the data that is stored in DNA-based storage systems. The data stored in these systems has the form of unordered sequences, also called strands, and every strand is synthesized thousands to millions of times, where some of these copies are read back during sequencing. Due to the unordered structure of the strands, an important task in the decoding process is to place them in their correct order. This is usually accomplished by allocating part of the strand for an index. However, in the presence of errors in the index field, important information on the order of the strands may be lost. Clustering-correcting codes ensure that if the distance between the index fields of two strands is small, their data fields have large distance. It is shown how this property enables to place the strands together in their correct clusters even in the presence of errors. We present lower and upper bounds on the size of clustering-correcting codes and an explicit construction of these codes which uses only a single symbol of redundancy. The results are first presented for the Hamming metric and are then extended for the edit distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diameter perfect codes form a natural generalization for perfect codes. They are based on the code-anticode bound which generalizes the sphere-packing bound. The code-anticode bound was proved by Delsarte for distance-regular graphs and it holds for some other metrics too. In this paper we prove the bound for non-binary constant-weight codes with the Hamming metric and characterize the diameter perfect codes and the maximum size anticodes for these codes. We distinguish between six families of non-binary diameter constant-weight codes and four families of maximum size non-binary constant-weight anticodes. Each one of these families of diameter perfect codes raises some different questions. We consider some of these questions and leave lot of ground for further research. Finally, as a consequence, some $t$ -intersecting families related to the well-known Erdös-Ko-Rado theorem, are constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a special subclass of cyclic codes, BCH codes have wide applications in communication and storage systems. A BCH code of length $n$ over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ is always relative to an $n$ -th primitive root of unity $\beta $ in an extension field of $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ , and is called a dually-BCH code if its dual is also a BCH code relative to the same $\beta $. The question as to whether a BCH code is a dually-BCH code is in general very hard to answer. In this paper, an answer to this question for primitive narrow-sense BCH codes and projective narrow-sense ternary BCH codes is given. Sufficient and necessary conditions in terms of the designed distances $\delta $ will be presented to ensure that these BCH codes are dually-BCH codes. In addition, the parameters of the primitive narrow-sense BCH codes and their dual codes are investigated. Some lower bounds on minimum distances of the dual codes of primitive and projective narrow-sense BCH codes are developed. Especially for binary primitive narrow-sense BCH codes, the new bounds on the minimum distances of the dual codes improve the classical Sidel’nikov bound, and are also better than the Carlitz and Uchiyama bound for large designed distances $\delta $. The question as to what subclasses of cyclic codes are BCH codes is also answered to some extent. As a byproduct, the parameters of some subclasses of cyclic codes are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the average age minimization problem where only a fraction of the network users can transmit simultaneously over unreliable channels. Finding the optimal scheduling scheme, in this case, is known to be challenging. Accordingly, the Whittle’s index policy was proposed in the literature as a low-complexity heuristic to the problem. Although simple to implement, characterizing this policy’s performance is recognized to be a notoriously tricky task. In the sequel, we provide a new mathematical approach to establish its optimality in the many-users regime for specific network settings. Contrary to previous works in the literature that use restrictive mathematical assumptions, which can be challenging to verify, our novel approach is based on intricate techniques and it is free of any strong mathematical assumptions. These findings showcase that the Whittle’s index policy has analytically provable asymptotic optimality for the AoI minimization problem. Finally, we lay out numerical results that corroborate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the policy’s notable performance in the many-users regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The zero capacity region for hexagonal $(d,k)$ run-length constraints is known for many, but not all, $d$ and $k$. The pairs $(d,k)$ for which it has been unproven whether the capacity is zero or positive consist of: (i) $k=d+2$ when $d\ge 2$ ; (ii) $k=d+3$ when $d \ge 1$ ; (iii) $k=d+4$ when either $d=4$ or $d$ is odd and $d \ge 3$ ; and (iv) $k=d+5$ when $d=4$. Here, we prove that the capacity is zero for all of case (i), and for case (ii) whenever $d \ge 7$. The method used in this paper is to reduce an infinite search space of valid labelings to a finite set of configurations that we exhaustively examine using backtracking. In Part II of this two-part series, we use automated procedures to prove that the capacity is zero in case (i) when $2 \le d \le 9$ , in case (ii) when $3 \le d \le 11$ , and in case (iii) when $d \in \{ 4,5,7,9 \}$ , and that the capacity is positive in case (ii) when $d \in \{1,2\}$ , in case (iii) when $d = 3$ , and in case (iv). Thus, the only remaining unknown cases are now when $k=d+4$ , for any odd $d \ge 11$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new method of constructing compact fully-connected Quasi-Cyclic Low Density Parity Check (QC-LDPC) codes with girth $g$ = 8, 10, and 12. The originality of the proposed method is to impose constraints on the exponent matrix P to reduce the search space drastically. For a targeted lifting degree of $N$ , the first step of the method is to sieve the integer ring $\mathbb {Z}_{N}$ to make a particular sub-group with specific properties to construct the second column of P (the first column being filled with zeros). The remaining columns of P are determined recursively as multiples of the second column by adapting the sequentially multiplied column (SMC) method whereby a controlled greedy search is applied at each step. The codes constructed with the proposed semi-algebraic method show lengths that can be significantly shorter than their best counterparts in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the stability of low-density parity-check codes under blockwise or bitwise maximum a posteriori decoding, where transmission takes place over a binary-input memoryless output-symmetric channel. Our study stems from the consideration of constructing universal capacity-achieving codes under low-complexity decoding algorithms, where universality refers to the fact that we are considering a family of channels with equal capacity. Consider, e.g., the right-regular sequence by Shokrollahi and the heavy-tail Poisson sequence by Luby et al. Both sequences are provably capacity-achieving under belief propagation decoding when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. In this paper we show that many existing capacity-achieving sequences of low-density parity-check codes are not universal under belief propagation decoding. We reveal that the key to showing this non-universality result is determined by the stability of the underlying codes. More concretely, for an ordered and complete channel family and a sequence of low-density parity-check code ensembles, we determine a stability threshold associated with them, which gives rise to a sufficient condition under which the sequence is not universal under belief propagation decoding. Moreover, we show that the same stability threshold applies to blockwise or bitwise maximum a posteriori decoding as well. We demonstrate how the stability threshold can determine an upper bound on the corresponding blockwise or bitwise maximum a posteriori threshold, revealing the operational significance of the stability threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider a massive random access scenario in which a small set of $k$ active users out of a large number of $n$ potential users need to be scheduled in $b\ge k$ slots. What is the minimum common feedback to the users needed to ensure that scheduling is collision-free? Instead of a naive scheme of listing the indices of the $k$ active users in the order in which they should transmit, at a cost of $k\log (n)$ bits, this paper shows that for the case of $b=k$ , the rate of the minimum fixed-length common feedback code scales only as $k \log (e)$ bits, plus an additive term that scales in $n$ as $\Theta (\log \log (n))$ for fixed $k$. If a variable-length code can be used, assuming uniform activity among the users, the minimum average common feedback rate still requires $k \log (e)$ bits, but the dependence on $n$ can be reduced to $O(1)$. When $b>k$ , the number of feedback bits needed for collision-free scheduling can be significantly further reduced. Moreover, a similar scaling on the minimum feedback rate is derived for the case of scheduling $m$ users per slot, when $k \le mb$. The problem of constructing a minimum collision-free feedback scheduling code is connected to that of constructing a perfect hashing family, which allows practical feedback scheduling codes to be constructed from perfect hashing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complete characterization for the restricted isometry constant (RIC) bounds on $\delta _{{{ tk}}}$ for all $ {t}>0$ is an important problem on recovery of sparse signals with prior support information via weighted $\ell _{{p}}$ -minimization ($0 < {p} \leqslant 1$). In this paper, new bounds on the restricted isometry constants $\delta _{{{ tk}}}$ ($0 < {t} < \frac {4}{3}{d}$), where $d$ is a key constant determined by prior support information, are established to guarantee the sparse signal recovery via the weighted $\ell _{{p}}$ minimization in both noiseless and noisy settings. This result fills a vacancy on $\delta _{{{ tk}}}$ with $0 < {t} < \frac {4}{3}{d}$ , compared with previous works on $\delta _{{{ tk}}}$ (${t} \geqslant \frac {4}3{d}$). We show that, when the accuracy of prior support estimate is at least 50%, the new recovery condition in terms of $\delta _{{{ tk}}}$ ($0 < {t} < \frac {4}{3}{d}$) via weighted $\ell _{1}$ minimization is weaker than the condition required by classical $\ell _{1}$ minimization without weighting. Our weighted $\ell _{1}$ minimization gives better recovery error bounds in noisy setting. Similarly, the new recovery condition in terms of $\delta _{{{ tk}}}$ ($0 < {t} < \frac {4}{3}{d}$) is extended to weighted $\ell _{{p}}$ ($0 < {p} < 1$) minimization, and it is also weaker than the condition obtained by standard non-convex $\ell _{{p}}$ ($0 < {p} < 1$) minimization without weighting. Numerical illustrations are provided to demonstrate our new theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with linear information inequalities valid for entropy functions induced by discrete random variables. Specifically, the so-called conditional Ingleton inequalities are in the center of interest: these are valid under conditional independence assumptions on the inducing random variables. We discuss five inequalities of this particular type, four of which has appeared earlier in the literature. Besides the proof of the new fifth inequality, simpler proofs of (some of) former inequalities are presented. These five information inequalities are used to characterize all conditional independence structures induced by four discrete random variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the capacity region of an average transmit power constrained Gaussian Broadcast Channel (GBC) with independent noise realizations at the receivers is enlarged by the presence of causal noiseless feedback. When the noise variances at the receivers are identical, even passive feedback via independent memoryless Gaussian links can lead to a capacity region enlargement. The last fact remains true even when the feedback noise variance is very high, and available only from one of the receivers. While such capacity enlargements are feasible for several other feedback models in the Gaussian BC setting, it is also known that feedback does not change the capacity region for physically degraded broadcast channels. In this paper, we consider a two user GBC with independent noise realizations at the receivers, where the feedback links from the receivers are corrupted by independent additive Gaussian noise processes. We investigate the set of four noise variances, two forward and two feedback, for which no capacity enlargement is possible. A sharp characterization of this region is derived, i.e., any quadruple outside the presented region will lead to a capacity enlargement, whereas quadruples inside will leave the capacity region unchanged. Our results lead to the conclusion that when the forward noise variances are different, too noisy a feedback from one of the receivers alone is not always beneficial for enlarging the capacity region, be it from the stronger user or the weaker one, in sharp contrast to the case of equal forward noise variances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the problem of secret key generation with one-way communication through both a rate-limited public channel and a rate-limited secure channels where the public channel is from Alice to Bob and Eve and the secure channel is from Alice to Bob. In this model, we do not pose any constraints on the sources, i.e. Bob is not degraded to or less noisy than Eve. We obtain the optimal secret key rate in this problem, both for the discrete memoryless sources and vector Gaussian sources. The vector Gaussian characterization is derived by suitably applying the enhancement argument, and proving a new extremal inequality. The extremal inequality can be seen as coupling of two extremal inequalities, which are related to the degraded compound MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel, and the vector generalization of Costa’s entropy power inequality, accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bazzi and Mitter showed that binary dihedral group codes are asymptotically good. In this paper we prove that the dihedral group codes over any finite field with strong duality property are asymptotically good. If the characteristic of the field is even, self-dual dihedral group codes are asymptotically good. If the characteristic of the field is odd, maximal self-orthogonal dihedral group codes and LCD dihedral group codes are asymptotically good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates reducing sub-packetization of capacity-achieving schemes for uncoded Storage Constrained Private Information Retrieval (SC-PIR) systems. In the SC-PIR system, a user aims to download one out of K files from N servers while revealing nothing about the identity of the requested file to any individual server, in which the K files are stored at the N servers in an uncoded form and each server can store up to μK equivalent files, where μ is the normalized storage capacity of each server. We first prove that there exists a capacity-achieving SC-PIR scheme for a given storage design if and only if all the packets are stored exactly at M ≜ μN servers for μ such that M = μN ∈ {2,3, . . . ,N}. Then, the optimal sub-packetization for capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes is characterized as the solution to an optimization problem, which is typically hard to solve since it involves non-continuous indicator functions. Moreover, a new notion of array called Storage Design Array (SDA) is introduced for the SC-PIR system. With any given SDA, an associated capacity-achieving SC-PIR scheme is constructed. Next, the SC-PIR schemes that have equal-size packets are investigated. Furthermore, the optimal equal-size sub-packetization among all capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes characterized by Woolsey et al. is proved to be N(M−1)/gcd (N,M), which is achieved by a construction of SDA. Finally, by allowing unequal size of packets, a greedy SDA construction is proposed, where the sub-packetization of the associated SC-PIR scheme is upper bounded by N(M−1)/gcd (N,M). Among all capacity-achieving linear SC-PIR schemes, the sub-packetization is optimal when min{M,N−M}|N or M = N, and within a multiplicative gap min{M,N−M}/gcd (N,M) of the optimal one in general. In particular, for the special case N = d ⋅ M ± 1 where the positive integer d ≥ 2, we propose another SDA construction to obtain lower sub-packetization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a multi-armed bandit in which each arm is a Markov process evolving on a finite state space. The state space is common across the arms, and the arms are independent of each other. The transition probability matrix of one of the arms (the odd arm) is different from the common transition probability matrix of all the other arms. A decision maker, who knows these transition probability matrices, wishes to identify the odd arm as quickly as possible, while keeping the probability of decision error small. To do so, the decision maker collects observations from the arms by pulling the arms in a sequential manner, one at each discrete time instant. However, the decision maker has a trembling hand, and the arm that is actually pulled at any given time differs, with a small probability, from the one he intended to pull. The observation at any given time is the arm that is actually pulled and its current state. The Markov processes of the unobserved arms continue to evolve. This makes the arms restless. For the above setting, we derive the first known asymptotic lower bound on the expected time required to identify the odd arm, where the asymptotics is of vanishing error probability. The continued evolution of each arm adds a new dimension to the problem, leading to a family of Markov decision problems (MDPs) on a countable state space. We then stitch together certain parameterised solutions to these MDPs and obtain a sequence of strategies whose expected times to identify the odd arm come arbitrarily close to the lower bound in the regime of vanishing error probability. Prior works dealt with independent and identically distributed (across time) arms and rested Markov arms, whereas our work deals with restless Markov arms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide two complementary results for cyclic codes of composite length. First, we give a general construction of cyclic codes of length nr from cyclic codes of length n and a lower bound on the minimum distance. Numerical data show that many cyclic codes of composite length with the best parameters can be obtained in this way. Second, in the other direction, we show that for cyclic codes of length n with a primitive n-th root of unity as a non-zero, the minimum distance is roughly bounded by the square-free part of n. This means that we shall not expect good cyclic codes of length n in general if, for example, the length n is divisible by a high power of a prime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Demirci-Selçuk’s meet-in-the-middle attack is one of the most important methods among all the cryptanalytic vectors, which gives the best result against the round-reduced AES with respect to the rounds, and tradeoffs between data, time and memory. While we have already built provable security models against the differential cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis cryptanalysis, impossible differential and zero-correlation linear cryptanalysis, the provable security against the meet-in-the-middle attack is missing. In this paper, we propose the subset representation of function based on which we could give an algorithm to compute the exact number of parameters of the Demirci-Selçuk’s distinguisher given the input and output, respectively. Experiments show that this algorithm can be more efficient than the automatical tool presented by Shi et al. at Asiacrypt 2018. We further extract a formula based on this algorithm and show an upper bound for the length of the Demirci-Selçuk’s distinguisher of an iterative SPN cipher. We prove that for an SPN block cipher whose block size equals the key size, an effective Demirci-Selçuk-type meet-in-the-middle distinguisher covers at most twice the maximum of the primitive indexes of the linear layer and its inverse. As a result, we show that the known length of the Demirci-Selçuk’s distinguisher of the AES-128 cannot be improved unless the details of the S-boxes are exploited, which demonstrates that the AES has a provable security against the Demirci-Selçuk’s meet-in-the-middle attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let P be a partial order on [n] = 1,2, . . . , n, Fqn be the linear space of n-tuples over a finite field Fq and w be a weight on Fq. In this paper, we consider metrics on Fqn induced by chain orders P over [n] and weights w over Fq, and we determine the cardinality of all optimal anticodes and completely classify them. Moreover, we determine all diameter perfect codes for a set of relevant instances on the aforementioned metric spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A primary objective of a distributed storage system is to reliably store huge amounts of source data for long periods of time using a large number of high storage capacity nodes. Storage nodes are prone to permanent failures, where such node failures cause all stored data to be permanently lost, and failed nodes are replaced with nodes that initially store no data. To maintain recoverability of the source data as storage nodes fail and are replaced, a total amount of storage capacity that is larger than the source data size is allocated to store the source data, and a repairer continually reads data from and writes data to the storage nodes as they fail and are replaced. We prove information-theoretic lower bounds on the rate at which a repairer reads data from the storage system as a function of the rate at which nodes fail and the amount by which the allocated storage capacity exceeds the source data size. These lower bounds hold for any repairer, i.e., any repairer that does not read data at or above the lower bound rate will provably not maintain recoverability of the source data. The bounds are provably tight asymptotically as the number of storage nodes grows and the allocated storage capacity approaches the source data size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]