Single block finite alphabet based source recovery and channel identification

Abstract

It has been known that under certain conditions the source symbols can be recovered and the channel identified given only the channel output and knowledge of the alphabet generating the source symbols. However. an arbitrarily large number of received symbols may have to be observed. This paper considers the case when null guards are present between blocks of symbols and proves that source recovery and channel identification is always possible given only a single received block. A Viterbi-like algorithm implementing this single block source recovery strategy is also derived.