Impact of Communication Channels on System Identification

This chapter deals with the identification of systems whose outputs must be quantized, transmitted through a communication channel, and observed afterwards. Communication errors introduce additional uncertainty that influences identification accuracy. To accomplish an information-oriented and algorithm-independent characterization of communication channels, we compare the Fisher information [or, equivalently, Cramer–Rao (CR) lower bound] of identification errors with and without communication channels. The concept of the Fisher information ratio (FI-R) is introduced. The relationship between the Fisher information ratio and Shannon’s mutual information and channel capacity is explained.