Practical codes for photon communication

Creators: McEliece, Robert J.

Abstract

In a recent paper, Pierce studied the problems of communicating at optical frequencies using photon-counting techniques, and concluded that "at low temperatures we encounter insuperable problems of encoding long before we approach [channel capacity]." In this paper it is shown that even assuming a noiseless model for photon communication for which capacity (measured in nats/photon) is infinite, it is unlikely that a signaling efficiency of even 10 nats/photon could be achieved practically. On the positive side, it is shown that pulse-position modulation plus Reed-Solomon coding yields practical results in the range of 2 to 3 nats/photon.

Additional Information

© 1981 IEEE. Reprinted with permission. Manuscript received April 28, 1980; revised September 1, 1980. This work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Contract NAS7-100. The results in this paper have been considerably influenced by the work of several other researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including most especially Joseph Katz, Richard Lipes, Eugene Rodemich, Arthur Rubin, and Lloyd Welch. Indeed, many of the results in this paper have already appeared in [10]-[13]. I would also like to point out that in [12], it is shown that as p increases above one the needed ratio of peak-to-average signal power also increases exponentially.

Files

MCEieeetit81.pdf

Files (948.2 kB)

Name	Size	Download all
MCEieeetit81.pdf md5:42dba0053a4d94115be0f54d0ca70484	948.2 kB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes