Robust and adaptive communication under uncertain interference

Robust and adaptive communication under uncertain interference by Anand Dilip Sarwate Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering—Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Designated Emphasis in Communication, Computation, and Statistics University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Gastpar, Chair In the future, wireless communication systems will play an increasingly integral role in society. Cutting-edge application areas such as cognitive radio, ad-hoc networks, and sensor networks are changing the way we think about wireless services. The demand for ubiquitous communication and computing requires flexible communication protocols that can operate in a range of conditions. This thesis adopts and extends a mathematical model for these communication systems that accounts for uncertainty and time variation in link qualities. The arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) is an information theoretic channel model that has a time varying state with no statistical description. We assume the state is chosen by an adversarial jammer, reflecting the demand that our constructions work for all state sequences. In this thesis we show how resources such as secret keys, feedback, and side-information can help communication under this kind of uncertainty. In order to put our results in context we provide a detailed taxonomy of the known results on AVCs in a unified setting. We then prove new results on list decoding