An MDP Approach to Computing Feedback Capacity

Sekhar Tatikonda
Yale University

In this talk we examine the capacity of Markov channels with feedback. One of the main difficulties in this problem has to do with the fact that the transmitter and the receiver may have different information about the state of the channel. We show how to choose appropriate sufficient statistics at the transmitter and receiver. We then formulate the capacity optimization problem as a Markov decision problem (MDP). The resulting Bellman equation can be viewed as a single-letter characterization of the capacity.


Bio: Sekhar Tatikonda is presently an associate professor of electrical engineering at Yale University. He received his PhD degree in EECS from MIT in 2000. He was a postdoctoral fellow in EECS at UC- Berkeley from 2000-2002. His research interests span topics in information theory, statistical AI, and stochastic control. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2006.