Implementation and Experimental Evaluation of Reed-Solomon Identification

Identification is a communication paradigm that promises exponential advantages over transmission for applications that do not actually require all messages to be reliably transmitted. Notably, the identification capacity theorems prove exponentially larger rates compared to classical transmission. However, there exist additional trade-offs that are not captured by these theorems and which become relevant for the deployment of identification in practical communication settings. In particular, in this paper we evaluate the latency introduced by computations at the encoder and decoder when employing identification codes. For this, we implement them using an explicit code construction based on Reed-Solomon codes and integrate it into a single carrier transmission system using software-defined radios. Our evaluation of the practical aspects of identification codes show that unless care is taken, these trade-offs can compromise the theoretical advantage given by the exponentially large identification rates.