Resilient communication against adversarial path-errors

Abstract

We consider a communication problem in which a transmitter encodes a source into several streams that are subject to modification by an omniscient adversary while en route. We design encodings with a distortion guarantee that degrades gradually as the number of streams that the adversary alters increases. Notably, we find that a mixture of highly redundant coding and uncoded transmission outperforms schemes that protect all of the transmitted data against adversarial attack. This finding is confirmed both theoretically and experimentally.