Analog Coding of a Source with Erasures

Analog coding decouples the tasks of protecting against erasures and noise. For erasure correction, it creates an "analog redundancy" by means of band-limited discrete Fourier transform (DFT) interpolation, or more generally, by an over-complete expansion based on a frame. We examine the analog coding paradigm for the dual setup of a source with "erasure" side-information (SI) at the encoder. The excess rate of analog coding above the rate-distortion function (RDF) is associated with the energy of the inverse of submatrices of the frame, where each submatrix corresponds to a possible erasure pattern. We give a partial theoretical as well as numerical evidence that a variety of structured frames, in particular DFT frames with difference-set spectrum and more general equiangular tight frames (ETFs), with a common MANOVA limiting spectrum, minimize the excess rate over all possible frames. However, they do not achieve the RDF even in the limit as the dimension goes to infinity.