On the capacity of channels with unknown interference

Abstract

The process of communicating in the presence of interference that is unknown or hostile is modeled as a two-person zero-sum game with the communicator and the jammer as the players. The objective function considered is the rate of reliable communication. The communicator's strategies are encoders and distributions on a set of quantizers. The jammer's strategies are distributions on the noise power subject to certain constraints. Various conditions are considered on the jammer's strategy set and on the communicator's knowledge. For the case where the decoder is uninformed of the actual quantizer chosen, it is shown that, from the communicator's perspective, the worst-case jamming strategy is a distribution concentrated on a finite number of points, thereby converting a functional optimization problem into a nonlinear programming problem. Moreover, the worst-case distributions can be characterized by means of necessary and sufficient conditions which are easy to verify. For the case where the decoder is informed of the actual quantizer chosen, the existence of saddle-point strategies is demonstrated. The analysis is also seen to be valid for a number of situations where the jammer is adaptive