Adaptive Lossless Data Compression over a Noisy Channel

Abstract

With dynamic communication a sender and receiver work in a “lock-step” cooperation to maintain identical copies of a dictionary D (which is constantly changing). A key application of dynamic communication is adaptive data compression. A potential drawback of dynamic communication is error propagation (that causes the sender and receiver dictionaries to diverge and possibly corrupt all data to follow). Protocols that require the receiver to request re-transmission from the sender when an error is detected can be impractical for many applications where such two way communication is not possible or self-defeating (e.g., with data compression, re-transmission is tantamount to losing the data that could have been transmitted in the mean time). We present a new model of error resilient communication where even though errors may not be detected, there are strong guarantees that their effects will not propagate.