Information processing ability of binary detectors and block decoders

This paper applies the concepts of information processing [S. Sinanovic et al., Jun. 2002] to the study of binary detectors and block decoders in a single user digital communication system. We quantify performance in terms of the information transfer ratio /spl gamma/ which measures how well systems preserve discrimination information between two stochastic signals. We investigate hard decision detectors and minimum distance decoders in various additive noise environments. We show that likelihood ratio digital demodulators maximize /spl gamma/.