Streaming Data Transmission in the Moderate Deviations and Central Limit Regimes

We consider streaming data transmission over a discrete memoryless channel. A new message is given to the encoder at the beginning of each block and the decoder decodes each message sequentially, after a delay of T blocks. In this streaming setup, we study the fundamental interplay between the rate and error probability in the central limit and moderate deviations regimes and show that: 1) in the moderate deviations regime, the moderate deviations constant improves over the block coding or non-streaming setup by a factor of T and 2) in the central limit regime, the second-order coding rate improves by a factor of approximately root T for a wide range of channel parameters. For both the regimes, we propose coding techniques that incorporate a joint encoding of fresh and previous messages. In particular, for the central limit regime, we propose a coding technique with truncated memory to ensure that a summation of constants, which arises as a result of applications of the central limit theorem, does not diverge in the error analysis. Furthermore, we explore interesting variants of the basic streaming setup in the moderate deviations regime. We first consider a scenario with an erasure option at the decoder, i.e., the decoder can output an erasure symbol instead of a message estimate, and show that both the exponents of the total error and the undetected error probabilities improve by factors of T. Next, by utilizing the erasure option, we show that the exponent of the total error probability can be improved to that of the undetected error probability (in the order sense) at the expense of a variable decoding delay.