Stabilizing a System with an Unbounded Random Gain Using Only Finitely Many Bits

We study the stabilization of an unpredictable linear control system where the controller must act based on a rate-limited observation of the state. More precisely, we consider the system X
_n+1
=A
_n
X
_n
+W
_n
-U
_n
, where the A
_n
's are drawn independently at random at each time n from a known distribution with unbounded support, and where the controller receives at most R bits about the system state at each time from an encoder. We provide a time-varying achievable strategy to stabilize the system in a second-moment sense with fixed, finite R. While our previous result provided a strategy to stabilize this system using a variable-rate code, this work provides an achievable strategy using a fixed-rate code. The strategy we employ to achieve this is time-varying and takes different actions depending on the value of the state. It proceeds in two modes: a normal mode (or zoom-in), where the realization of An is typical, and an emergency mode (or zoom-out), where the realization of An is exceptionally large.