From Symmetry to Capacity: Nested Codes on Binary Memoryless Symmetric Channels

Abstract

The past decade has seen notable advances in our understanding of structured error-correcting codes, particularly binary Reed-Muller (RM) codes. While initial breakthroughs were for erasure channels based on symmetry, extending these results to the binary symmetric channel (BSC) and other binary memoryless symmetric (BMS) channels required new tools and conditions. Recent work uses nesting to obtain multiple weakly correlated looks at each code bit to establish capacity-achieving performance under bit-MAP and block-MAP decoding. This paper revisits and extends past approaches, aiming to simplify proofs, unify insights, remove unnecessary conditions, and provide new results. By leveraging powerful results from the analysis of boolean functions, we derive recursive bounds using two or three looks at each stage. This gives bounds on the bit-error probability that decay exponentially in the number of stages. For the BSC, we incorporate level-k inequalities and hypercontractive techniques to achieve the faster decay rate required for vanishing block-error probability. The same ideas also extend to product codes with RM component codes, which are transitive but not doubly-transitive in general, and yield vanishing bit-error and block-error probability at rates arbitrarily close to capacity. The results are presented in a semi-tutorial style, providing both theoretical insights and practical implications for future research on structured codes.