A Deterministic Algorithm for the Capacity of Finite-State Channels

Abstract: We propose two modified versions of the classical gradient ascent method to compute the capacity of finite-state channels with Markovian inputs. For the case that the channel mutual information is strongly concave in a parameter taking values in a compact convex subset of some Euclidean space, our first algorithm proves to achieve polynomial accuracy in polynomial time and, moreover, for some special families of finite-state channels our algorithm can achieve exponential accuracy in polynomial time under some technical conditions. For the case that the channel mutual information may not be strongly concave, our second algorithm proves to be at least locally convergent.