One-Cold Poisson Channel: A Simple Continuous-Time Channel with Zero Dispersion

Abstract

We introduce the one-cold Poisson channel (OCPC), where the transmitter chooses one of several frequency bands to attenuate at a time. In particular, the perfect OCPC, where the number of bands is unlimited, is an extremely simple continuous-time memoryless channel. It has a capacity 1, zero channel dispersion, and an information spectrum being the degenerate distribution at 1. It is the only known nontrivial (discrete or continuous-time) memoryless channel with a closed-form formula for its optimal non-asymptotic error probability, making it the simplest channel in this sense. A potential application is optical communication with a tunable band rejection filter. Due to its simplicity, we may use it as a basic currency of information that is infinitely divisible, as an alternative to bits which are not infinitely divisible. OCPC with perfect feedback gives a generalization of prefix codes. We also study non-asymptotic coding and channel simulation results for the general OCPC.