Spherical code

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of spherical codes and designs. A finite non-empty set X of unit vectors in Euclidean space R d has several characteristics, such as the dimension d ( X ) of the space spanned by X , its cardinality n = | X |, its degree s( X ), and its strength t ( X ).The chapter presents derivation of bounds for the cardinality of spherical A -codes in terms of the Gegenbauer coefficients of polynomials compatible with A . It also discusses spherical ( d , n , s , i)- configurations X . These are sets X of cardinality n on the unit sphere Ω d , which are spherical t -designs and spherical A -codes with I A I = s ; in other words, the strength t ( X ) is at least t and the degree s ( X ) is at most s . A condition is given for a spherical A -code to be a spherical t -design, in terms of the Gegenbauer coefficients of an annihilator of the set A . The chapter presents many examples of spherical ( d , n , s , t )-configurations; there exist tight spherical t-designs with t = 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, and non-tight spherical ( 2s − 1)-designs. The constructions of these examples use sets of lines with few angles and association schemes, respectively.

Abstract: We study configurations of points on the unit sphere that minimize potential energy for a broad class of potential functions (viewed as functions of the squared Euclidean distance between points). Call a configuration sharp if there are m distances between distinct points in it and it is a spherical (2m-1)-design. We prove that every sharp configuration minimizes potential energy for all completely monotonic potential functions. Examples include the minimal vectors of the E_8 and Leech lattices. We also prove the same result for the vertices of the 600-cell, which do not form a sharp configuration. For most known cases, we prove that they are the unique global minima for energy, as long as the potential function is strictly completely monotonic. For certain potential functions, some of these configurations were previously analyzed by Yudin, Kolushov, and Andreev; we build on their techniques. We also generalize our results to other compact two-point homogeneous spaces, and we conclude with an extension to Euclidean space.

Abstract: We consider two codes based on dynamical systems, for transmitting information from a continuous alphabet, discrete-time source over a Gaussian channel. The first code, a homogeneous spherical code, is generated by the linear dynamical system s/spl dot/=As, with A a square skew-symmetric matrix. The second code is generated by the shift map s/sub n/=b/sub n/s/sub n-1/(mod 1). The performance of each of these codes is determined by the geometry of its locus or signal set, specifically, its arc length and minimum distance, suitably defined. We show that the performance analyses for these systems are closely related, and derive exact expressions and bounds for relevant geometric parameters. We also observe that the lattice /spl Zopf//sup N/ underlies both modulation systems and we develop a fast decoding algorithm that relies on this observation. Analytic results show that for fixed bandwidth expansion, good scaling behavior of the mean squared error is obtained relative to the channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Particularly interesting is the resulting observation that sampled, exponentially chirped modulation codes are good bandwidth expansion codes.