arXiv subjects

Michèle Wigger

Publications and source records attributed to Michèle Wigger.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Exact Rate Exponent Tradeoff for New Classes of Distributed Hypothesis Testing Problems

We characterize the exact rate--exponent tradeoff for new classes of one-way distributed hypothesis testing problems by demonstrating that a recent upper bound, derived via the auxiliary-receiver technique, coincides with known lower bounds. We achieve this by relaxing the upper bound on the type-II error exponent into a form that shares the same inner functional as Han's lower bound, differing only in the outer rate constraint. Furthermore, we prove that this upper bound is tight for testing against dependence and for the doubly symmetric binary source (DSBS) with crossover probabilities $κ_0$ under the null hypothesis and $κ_1$ under the alternative hypothesis, provided $0 < κ_1 < κ_0 < \frac12$. The characterization of the exact error exponent for the DSBS source holds for every communication rate $R \geq 0$.

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arXiv2026

Channel Capacity under the Subtractive Dithered Quantization Model

We study the capacity of an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel followed by a subtractive dithered uniform quantizer. Under the Schuchman conditions and with negligible overload probability, the system admits an additive-noise representation in which the effective noise is the sum of Gaussian and uniform components. Capacity bounds are derived for this model where inputs are subject to an average-power constraint as well as a peak-amplitude constraint, where the latter accounts for the limited quantizer dynamic range. Specifically, a computable lower bound is obtained based on the entropy power inequality (EPI), using the maximum-entropy input under the above constraints. Tighter numerical lower bounds are derived using discrete input constellations with finite mass points. Finally, an upper bound is obtained by exploiting the maximum-entropy property of the Gaussian distribution for a given variance. Numerical results show that, for a K-level quantizer, discrete constellations with K mass points already achieve near-optimal rates among the tested families. Moreover, our upper bound is close to the lower bounds in the moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime; thus it provides a simple capacity approximation in this regime.

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arXiv2026

Fundamental Limits of Quantized MIMO ISAC under Gaussian Signaling

We study a quantized multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system in which the communication and sensing receivers each apply analog spatial combining followed by scalar subtractive dithered quantization. This quantization model leads to an additive effective-noise representation with non-Gaussian noise. We derive upper and lower bounds on the capacity of this channel. Numerical results show that these bounds are tight at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and saturate at high SNR due to finite-resolution quantization. They also show that, despite the effective noise being non-Gaussian, independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) isotropic Gaussian signaling achieves rates close to capacity. Focusing on i.i.d. Gaussian signaling, this paper also presents a closed-form expression for the linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) achieved under a Kronecker sensing-channel model. Numerical results show that the LMMSE also saturates at high SNR, where the saturation level increases as the spatial combining ratio decreases, and for combining ratios below one, saturation occurs even without quantization.

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arXiv2026

Covert Capacity of Degraded Broadcast Channels

We derive the capacity region of the degraded broadcast channel (DBC) subject to the constraint that the communication is not detected by an adversary, the Warden. Our capacity result is in a computable form and numerical results show that time-sharing is suboptimal in general, and improved rates can be obtained through superposition coding.

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arXiv2026

Distributed Hypothesis Testing Under A Covertness Constraint

We study distributed hypothesis testing under a covertness constraint in the non-alert situation, which requires that under the null-hypothesis an external warden be unable to detect whether communication between the sensor and the decision center is taking place. We characterize the achievable Stein exponent of this setup when the channel from the sensor to the decision center is a partially-connected discrete memoryless channel (DMC), i.e., when certain output symbols can only be induced by some of the inputs. The Stein-exponent in this case, does not depend on the specific transition law of the DMC and equals Shalaby and Papamarcou's exponent without a warden but where the sensor can send $k$ noise-free bits to the decision center, for $k$ a function that is sublinear in the observation length $n$. For fully-connected DMCs, we propose an achievable Stein-exponent and show that it can improve over the local exponent at the decision center. All our coding schemes do not require that the sensor and decision center share a common secret key, as commonly assumed in covert communication. Moreover, in our schemes the divergence covertness constraint vanishes (almost) exponentially fast in the obervation length $n$, again, an atypical behaviour for covert communication.

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arXiv2026

Necessity of Cooperative Transmissions for Wireless MapReduce

The paper presents an improved upper bound (achievability result) on the optimal tradeoff between Normalized Delivery Time (NDT) and computation load for distributed computing MapReduce systems in certain ranges of the parameters. The upper bound is based on interference alignment combined with zero-forcing. The paper further provides a lower bound (converse) on the optimal NDT-computation tradeoff that can be achieved when IVAs are partitioned into sub-IVAs, and these sub-IVAs are then transmitted (in an arbitrary form) by a single node, without cooperation among nodes. For appropriate linear functions (e.g., XORs), such non-cooperative schemes can achieve some of the best NDT-computation tradeoff points so far obtained in the literature. However, as our lower bound shows, any non-cooperative scheme achieves a worse NDT-computation tradeoff than our new proposed scheme for certain parameters, thus proving the necessity of cooperative schemes like zero-forcing to attain the optimal NDT-computation tradeoff.

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arXiv2026

On the Optimality of Decode and Forward for Some Cooperative Broadcast Channels

This article characterizes new boundary points on the capacity region of certain classes of more capable broadcast channels (BC) with uni-directional cooperation from the stronger to the weaker receiver. The new boundary points are achieved by a simple coding scheme that employs superposition coding at the transmitter with decode and forward at the stronger receiver. We evaluate our general result for Gaussian BCs and for a BC consisting of a binary erasure channel (BEC) to the stronger receiver and a binary symmetric channel (BSC) to the weaker receiver.

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arXiv2026

Distributed Detection under Stringent Resource Constraints

This paper identifies the Stein-exponent of distributed detection when the sensor communicates to the decision center over a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) subject to one of three stringent communication constraints: 1) The number of channel uses of the DMC grows sublinearly in the number of source observations n; 2) The number of channel uses is n but a block-input cost constraint is imposed almost surely, which grows sublinearly in n; 3) The block-input constraint is imposed only on expectation. We identify a dichotomy in the Stein-exponent of all these setups depending on the structure of the DMC's transition law. Under any of these three constraints, when the DMC is partially-connected (i.e., some outputs cannot be induced by certain inputs) the Stein-exponent matches the exponent identified by Han and Kobayashi and by Shalaby and Papamarcou for the scenario where communication is of zero-rate but over a noiseless link. We prove our result by adapting Han's zero-rate coding strategy to partially-connected DMCs. In contrast, for fully-connected DMCs, in our scenarios 1) and 2) the Stein-exponent collapses to that of a local test at the decision center, rendering the remote sensor and communication useless. %To prove this result, we propose new converse proofs relying on change of measure arguments. In scenario 3), the sensor remains beneficial even for fully-connected DMCs, however also collapses compared to the case of a partially-connected DMC. Moreover, the Stein-exponent is larger when the expectation constraint is imposed only under the null hypothesis compared to when it is imposed under both hypotheses. To prove these results, we propose both new coding strategies and new converse proofs.

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arXiv2025

Multi-Sensor Distributed Hypothesis Testing in the Low-Power Regime

We characterize the Stein-exponent of a distributed hypothesis testing scenario where two sensors transmit information through a memoryless multiple access channel (MAC) subject to a sublinear input cost constraint with respect to the number of channel uses and where the decision center has access to an additional local observation. Our main theorem provides conditions on the channel and cost functions for which the Stein-exponent of this distributed setup is no larger than the Stein-exponent of the local test at the decision center. Under these conditions, communication from the sensors to the decision center is thus useless in terms of Stein-exponent. The conditions are satisfied for additive noise MACs with generalized Gaussian noise under a p-th moment constraint (including the Gaussian channel with second-moment constraint) and for the class of fully-connected (where all inputs can induce all outputs) discrete memoryless multiple-access channels (DMMACs) under arbitrary cost constraints. We further show that for DMMACs that are not fully-connected, the Stein-exponent is larger and coincides with that of a setup with zero-rate noiseless communication links from either both sensors or only one sensor, as studied in [1].

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arXiv2025

Typicality with Feedback

The main objective of this paper is to analyze a closed-loop feedback system where a transmitter probes a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) and can adapt its inputs based on the previous channel outputs. We prove that, regardless of the transmitter's strategy, the conditional type of the outputs given the inputs remains close to the DMC transition law $P_{Y|X}$. This general result enables the study of fundamental limits in certain adaptive systems. As an application, we establish a converse result for an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) model. In this setting, the transmitter also functions as a radar receiver, aiming to simultaneously transmit a message over the channel and estimate the channel state from the backscattered feedback signals. We show that the fundamental limits of the closed loop system are the same as of the open-loop system where the transmitter can use the feedback signal to estimate the state but not to produce adaptive channel inputs. This result holds as long as the sum of the admissible-average-decoding-error-probability, denoted $ε$, and the admissible-excess-distortion-probability, denoted $δ$, is below $1$, i.e., $δ+ε< 1$.

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arXiv2024

A Memory-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach to Integrated Sensing and Communication

In this paper, we consider a point-to-point integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a transmitter conveys a message to a receiver over a channel with memory and simultaneously estimates the state of the channel through the backscattered signals from the emitted waveform. Using Massey's concept of directed information for channels with memory, we formulate the capacity-distortion tradeoff for the ISAC problem when sensing is performed in an online fashion. Optimizing the transmit waveform for this system to simultaneously achieve good communication and sensing performance is a complicated task, and thus we propose a deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to find a solution. The proposed approach enables the agent to optimize the ISAC performance by learning a reward that reflects the difference between the communication gain and the sensing loss. Since the state-space in our RL model is à priori unbounded, we employ deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG). Our numerical results suggest a significant performance improvement when one considers unbounded state-space as opposed to a simpler RL problem with reduced state-space. In the extreme case of degenerate state-space only memoryless signaling strategies are possible. Our results thus emphasize the necessity of well exploiting the memory inherent in ISAC systems.

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arXiv2024

Whispering Secrets in a Crowd: Leveraging Non-Covert Users for Covert Communications

This paper establishes the fundamental limits of a multi-access system where multiple users communicate to a legitimate receiver in presence of an external warden. Only a specific subset of the users, called covert users, needs their communication to remain undetected to the warden, while the remaining non-covert users have no such constraint. The fundamental limits show a tradeoff between the different rates that are simultaneously achievable at the various users in function of the secret-key rates that the different users share with the legitimate receiver. Interestingly, the presence of the non-covert users can enhance the capacities of the covert users, especially under stringent secret-key budgets. Our findings underscore the essential requirement of employing a multiplexing (coded time-sharing) strategy to exhaust the fundamental region of all rates that are simultaneously achievable at the covert and the non-covert users. As a side-product of our results, we also establish the covert-capacity secret-key tradeoff for standard single-user and multi-access covert communication systems (without non-covert users), i.e., the largest covert rates that are achievable under given secret-key rate budgets. Previous works had only established the minimum secret-key rates required at largest covert rates.

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arXiv2024

Unveiling Covert Semantics: Joint Source-Channel Coding Under a Covertness Constraint

The fundamental limit of Semantic Communications (joint source-channel coding) is established when the transmission needs to be kept covert from an external warden. We derive information-theoretic achievability and matching converse results and we show that source and channel coding separation holds for this setup. Furthermore, we show through an experimental setup that one can train a deep neural network to achieve covert semantic communication for the classification task. Our numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings, which indicate that for reliable joint source-channel coding the number of transmitted source symbols can only scale as the square-root of the number of channel uses.

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arXiv2024

Covert Multi-Access Communication with a Non-Covert User

In this paper, we characterize the fundamental limits of a communication system with three users (i.e., three transmitters) and a single receiver where communication from two covert users must remain undetectable to an external warden. Our results show a tradeoff between the highest rates that are simultaneously achievable for the three users. They further show that the presence of a non-covert user in the system can enhance the capacities of the covert users under stringent secret-key constraints. To derive our fundamental limits, we provide an information-theoretic converse proof and present a coding scheme that achieves the performance of our converse result. Our coding scheme is based on multiplexing different code phases, which seems to be essential to exhaust the entire tradeoff region between the rates at the covert and the two non-covert users. This property is reminiscent of the setup with multiple non-covert users, where multiplexing is also required to exhaust the entire rate-region.

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arXiv2024

Integrated Sensing and Communication in the Finite Blocklength Regime

A point-to-point integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system is considered where a transmitter conveys a message to a receiver over a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) and simultaneously estimates the state of the channel through the backscattered signals of the emitted waveform. We derive achievability and converse bounds on the rate-distortion-error tradeoff in the finite blocklength regime, and also characterize the second-order rate-distortion-error region for the proposed setup. Numerical analysis shows that our proposed joint ISAC scheme significantly outperforms traditional time-sharing based schemes where the available resources are split between the sensing and communication tasks.

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arXiv2023

Interference Networks with Random User Activity and Heterogeneous Delay Constraints

To answer the call for a new theoretical framework to simultaneously accommodate random user activity and heterogeneous delay traffic in Internet of Things (IoT) systems, in this paper we propose coding schemes and information-theoretic converse results for the transmission of heterogeneous delay traffic over interference networks with random user activity and random data arrivals. The heterogeneous traffic is composed of delay-tolerant traffic and delay-sensitive traffic where only the former can benefit from transmitter and receiver cooperation since the latter is subject to stringent decoding delays. The total number of cooperation rounds at transmitter and receiver sides is limited to $\D$ rounds. Each transmitter is active with probability $ρ\in [0,1]$. We consider two different models for the arrival of the mixed-delay traffic: in Model~$1$, each active transmitter sends a delay-tolerant message, and with probability $ρ_f \in [0,1]$ also transmits an additional delay-sensitive message; in Model~$2$, each active transmitter sends either a delay-sensitive message with probability $ρ_f$ or a delay-tolerant message with probability $1-ρ_f$. We derive inner and outer bounds on the fundamental per-user multiplexing gain (MG) region of the symmetric Wyner network as well as inner bounds on the fundamental MG region of the hexagonal model. Our inner and outer bounds are generally very close and coincide in special cases. They also show that when both transmitters and receivers can cooperate, then under Model~$1$, transmitting delay-sensitive messages hardly causes any penalty on the sum per-user MG, and under Model~$2$, operating at large delay-sensitive per-user MGs incurs no penalty on the delay-tolerant per-user MG and thus increases the sum per-user MG.

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arXiv2023

Joint Coding of eMBB and URLLC in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications

A point-to-point communication is considered where a roadside unite (RSU) wishes to simultaneously send messages of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) services to a vehicle. The eMBB message arrives at the beginning of a block and its transmission lasts over the entire block. During each eMBB transmission block, random arrivals of URLLC messages are assumed. To improve the reliability of the URLLC transmissions, the RSU reinforces their transmissions by mitigating the interference of eMBB transmission by means of dirty paper coding (DPC). In the proposed coding scheme, the eMBB messages are decoded based on two approaches: treating interference as noise, and successive interference cancellation. Rigorous bounds are derived for the error probabilities of eMBB and URLLC transmissions achieved by our scheme. Numerical results illustrate that they are lower than bounds for standard time-sharing.

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arXiv2023

Mixing a Covert and a Non-Covert User

This paper establishes the fundamental limits of a two-user single-receiver system where communication from User 1 (but not from User 2) needs to be undetectable to an external warden. Our fundamental limits show a tradeoff between the highest rates (or square-root rates) that are simultaneously achievable for the two users. Moreover, coded time-sharing for both users is fundamentally required on most channels, which distinguishes this setup from the more classical setups with either only covert users or only non-covert users. Interestingly, the presence of a non-covert user can be beneficial for improving the covert capacity of the other user.

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