Title: On the Throughput of Channels that Wear Out,
Abstract: This work investigates the fundamental limits of communication over a noisy
discrete memoryless channel that wears out, in the sense of signal-dependent
catastrophic failure. In particular, we consider a channel that starts as a
memoryless binary-input channel and when the number of transmitted ones causes
a sufficient amount of damage, the channel ceases to convey signals. Constant
composition codes are adopted to obtain an achievability bound and the
left-concave right-convex inequality is then refined to obtain a converse bound
on the log-volume throughput for channels that wear out. Since infinite
blocklength codes will always wear out the channel for any finite threshold of
failure and therefore cannot convey information at positive rates, we analyze
the performance of finite blocklength codes to determine the maximum expected
transmission volume at a given level of average error probability. We show that
this maximization problem has a recursive form and can be solved by dynamic
programming. Numerical results demonstrate that a sequence of block codes is
preferred to a single block code for streaming sources.