Sequential decomposition of discrete memoryless channel with noisy feedback

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a discrete memoryless point to point channel with noisy feedback, where there is a sender with a private message that she wants to communicate to a receiver by sequentially transmitting symbols over a noisy channel. After each transmission, she receives a noisy feedback of the symbol received by the receiver. The goal is to design transmission control strategy of the sender that minimize the average probability of error. This is an instance of decentralized control of information where the two controllers, the sender and the receiver have no common information. There exist no methodology in the literature that provides a notion of "state" and a dynamic program to find optimal policies for this problem In this paper, we show introduce a notion of state, based on which we provide a sequential decomposition methodology that finds optimum policies within the class of Markov strategies with respect to this state (which need not be globally optimum). This allows to decompose the problem across time and reduce the complexity dependence on time from double exponential to linear in time.