The performance of iterative decoding techniques for linear block codes correcting erasures depends very much on the sizes of the stopping sets associated with the underlying Tanner graph, or, equivalently, the parity-check matrix representing the code. In this correspondence, we introduce the notion of dead-end sets to explicitly demonstrate this dependency. The choice of the parity-check matrix entails a tradeoff between performance and complexity. We give bounds on the complexity of iterative decoders achieving optimal performance in terms of the sizes of the underlying parity-check matrices. Further, we fully characterize codes for which the optimal stopping set enumerator equals the weight enumerator.

Balancing of q-ary sequences, using a generalization of Knuth's efficient parallel balancing scheme, is considered. It is shown that the new general scheme is as simple as the original binary scheme, which lends itself to parallel decoding of the balanced sequences.

We consider the transmission and storage of encoded strings of symbols over a noisy channel, where dynamic threshold detection is proposed for achieving resilience against unknown scaling and offset of the received signal. We derive simple rules for dynamically estimating the unknown scale (gain) and offset. The estimates of the actual gain and offset so obtained are used to adjust the threshold levels or to re-scale the received signal within its regular range. Then, the re-scaled signal, brought into its standard range, can be forwarded to the final detection/decoding system, where optimum use can be made of the distance properties of the code by applying, for example, the Chase algorithm. A worked example of a spin-torque transfer magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) with an application to an extended (72, 64) Hamming code is described, where the retrieved signal is perturbed by additive Gaussian noise and unknown gain or offset.

We report on coding methods for efficiently synthesizing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) for massive data storage, where a plurality of DNA strands are synthesized in parallel. We examine the trade-offs between the information contents, redundancy, and the average or maximum number of cycles required for synthesizing a plurality of parallel DNA strands. We analyze coding methods such as guided scrambling and constrained codes for minimizing the cycle count.

DNA-based storage is considered to be a promising option to accommodate huge amounts of data. The strings of nucleotides are prone to errors though. To reduce the error probability, these strings should satisfy constraints on the ratio of A’s and T’s versus the number of G’s and C’s, and on the maximum number of repeated identical nucleotides. To deal with errors when they occur after all, it is also desirable that the set of DNA-strings possesses certain error correction or detection capabilities. This is established by designing quaternary constrained codes with a specified minimum distance. Here, maximum-sized block codes with a fixed number of G/C symbols, no symbol repetition, and a minimum Hamming distance of two are presented.

In this paper, we consider communication on a two-hop channel in which a source wants to send information reliably and securely to the destination via a relay. We consider both the untrusted relay case and the external eavesdropper case. In the untrusted relay case, the relay behaves as an eavesdropper, and there is a cooperative node, which sends a jamming signal to confuse the relay when it is receiving from the source. In the external eavesdropper case, the relay is trusted, and there is an external node eavesdropping the communication. We propose two secure transmission schemes using the scaled compute-and-forward technique. One of the schemes is based on a random binning code, and the other one is based on a lattice chain code. It is proved that in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) scenario and/or the limited relay power scenario, if the destination is used as the jammer, both schemes outperform all existing schemes and achieve the upper bound. In particular, if the SNR is large and the source, the relay, and the cooperative jammer have identical power and channels, both schemes achieve the upper bound for secrecy rate, which is merely 1/2 bit per channel use lower than the channel capacity without secrecy constraints. We also prove that one of our schemes achieves a positive secrecy rate in the external eavesdropper case in which the relay is trusted and there exists an external eavesdropper.