Bounds on the Capacity of the Unidirectional Channels

• Authors: Luca G. Tallini
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers
• Year: 2005

In the usual binary symmetric channel, both 1\to0 and 0\to1 types of errors can occur. In the binary asymmetric channel, only 1\to0 type of errors can occur, whereas, in the unidirectional channel, both 1\to0 and 0\to1 types of errors can occur, but, unlike the binary symmetric channel, for any particular transmitted word of length n, all the errors are of the same type. In general, a symmetric/unidirectional channel is a channel which shows the behavior of both the symmetric and unidirectional channel. Many practical systems, such as semiconductor memories and circuits, can be modeled as a unidirectional and/or symmetric/unidirectional channels. This paper gives the formal definition of these last two channels and shows some interesting simple bounds on their information capacities.