A Characterization of the Shannon Ordering of Communication Channels

Abstract: The ordering of communication channels was first introduced by Shannon. In this paper, we aim to find a characterization of the Shannon ordering. We show that $W'$ contains $W$ if and only if $W$ is the skew-composition of $W'$ with a convex-product channel. This fact is used to derive a characterization of the Shannon ordering that is similar to the Blackwell-Sherman-Stein theorem. Two channels are said to be Shannon-equivalent if each one is contained in the other. We investigate the topologies that can be constructed on the space of Shannon-equivalent channels. We introduce the strong topology and the BRM metric on this space. Finally, we study the continuity of a few channel parameters and operations under the strong topology.