Explicit and Efficient Constructions of Coding Schemes for the Binary Deletion Channel and the Poisson Repeat Channel

Abstract: This work gives an explicit construction of a family of error correcting codes for the binary deletion channel and for the Poisson repeat channel. In the binary deletion channel with parameter $p$ (BDC$p$) every bit is deleted independently with probability $p$. A lower bound of $(1-p)/9$ is known on the capacity of the BDC$_p$ \cite{mitzenmacher2006simple}, yet no explicit construction is known to achieve this rate. We give an explicit family of codes of rate $(1-p)/16$, for every $p$. This improves upon the work of Guruswami and Li \cite{guruswami2017efficiently} that gave a construction of rate $(1-p)/120$. The codes in our family have polynomial time encoding and decoding algorithms. Another channel considered in this work is the Poisson repeat channel with parameter $\lambda$ (PRC${\lambda}$) in which every bit is replaced with a discrete Poisson number of copies of that bit, where the number of copies has mean $\lambda$. We show that our construction works for this channel as well. As far as we know, this is the first explicit construction of an error correcting code for PRC$_{\lambda}$.