Carnot in the Information Age: Discrete Symmetric Channels

Abstract: Modeling communication channels as thermal systems results in Hamiltonians which are an explicit function of the temperature. The first two authors have recently generalized the second thermodynamic law to encompass systems with temperature-dependent energy levels, $dQ=TdS+<d\mathcal{E}/dT>dT$, where {$<\cdot>$} denotes averaging over the Boltzmann distribution, recomputing the mutual information and other main properties of the popular Gaussian channel. Here the mutual information for the binary symmetric channel as well as for the discrete symmetric channel consisting of 4 input/output (I/O) symbols is explicitly calculated using the generalized second law of thermodynamics. For equiprobable I/O the mutual information of the examined channels has a very simple form, -$\gamma U(\gamma)|_0^\beta$, where $U$ denotes the internal energy of the channel. We prove that this simple form of the mutual information governs the class of discrete memoryless symmetric communication channels with equiprobable I/O symbols.