The Capacity of Online (Causal) $q$-ary Error-Erasure Channels

Abstract: In the $q$-ary online (or "causal") channel coding model, a sender wishes to communicate a message to a receiver by transmitting a codeword $$\mathbf{x} =(x_1,\ldots,x_n) \in {0,1,\ldots,q-1}<sup>n$$ symbol by symbol via a channel limited to at most $pn$ errors and/or $p^{*} n$ erasures. The channel is "online" in the sense that at the $i$th step of communication the channel decides whether to corrupt the $i$th symbol or not based on its view so far, i.e., its decision depends only on the transmitted symbols $(x_1,\ldots,x_i)$. This is in contrast to the classical adversarial channel in which the corruption is chosen by a channel that has a full knowledge on the sent codeword $\mathbf{x}$. In this work we study the capacity of $q$-ary online channels for a combined corruption model, in which the channel may impose at most $pn$ {\em errors} and at most $p^{*} n$ {\em erasures} on the transmitted codeword. The online channel (in both the error and erasure case) has seen a number of recent studies which present both upper and lower bounds on its capacity. In this work, we give a full characterization of the capacity as a function of $q,p$, and $p<sup>{*}$.