Achievable and Converse bounds over a general channel and general decoding metric

Abstract: Achievable and converse bounds for general channels and mismatched decoding are derived. The direct (achievable) bound is derived using random coding and the analysis is tight up to factor 2. The converse is given in term of the achievable bound and the factor between them is given. This gives performance of the best rate-R code with possible mismatched decoding metric over a general channel, up to the factor that is identified. In the matched case we show that the converse equals the minimax meta-converse of Polyanskiy et al.