Improvement of the Bfloat16 Floating-Point for the Laplacian Source

The paper analyzes performance of the Bfloat16 floating-point format for the Laplacian source, using the analogy between the floating-point format and a piecewise uniform quantizer. Furthermore, suggesting slightly different allocation of bits, the paper proposes a new 16-bit floating-point format that can achieve for 6 dB higher SQNR (signal-to-quantization noise ratio) than the Bfloat16 format, having less complexity in the same time. The proposed 16-bit format is suitable for implementation on devices with limited hardware resources, such as smart sensor nodes and edge devices.