A Randomized Approach to the Capacity of Finite-State Channels

Abstract: Inspired by the ideas from the field of stochastic approximation, we propose a randomized algorithm to compute the capacity of a finite-state channel with a Markovian input. When the mutual information rate of the channel is concave with respect to the chosen parameterization, we show that the proposed algorithm will almost surely converge to the capacity of the channel and derive the rate of convergence. We also discuss the convergence behavior of the algorithm without the concavity assumption.