Paper detail

Explicit Capacity-achieving Codes for Worst-Case Additive Errors

For every p in (0,1/2), we give an explicit construction of binary codes of rate approaching "capacity" 1-H(p) that enable reliable communication in the presence of worst-case additive errors}, caused by a channel oblivious to the codeword (but not necessarily the message). Formally, we give an efficient "stochastic" encoding E(\cdot,\cdot) of messages combined with a small number of auxiliary random bits, such that for every message m and every error vector e (that could depend on m) that contains at most a fraction p of ones, w.h.p over the random bits r chosen by the encoder, m can be efficiently recovered from the corrupted codeword E(m,r) + e by a decoder without knowledge of the encoder's randomness r. Our construction for additive errors also yields explicit deterministic codes of rate approaching 1-H(p) for the "average error" criterion: for every error vector e of at most p fraction 1's, most messages m can be efficiently (uniquely) decoded from the corrupted codeword C(m)+e. Note that such codes cannot be linear, as the bad error patterns for all messages are the same in a linear code. We also give a new proof of the existence of such codes based on list decoding and certain algebraic manipulation detection codes. Our proof is simpler than the previous proofs from the literature on arbitrarily varying channels.