On Coding Over Sliced Information

Abstract

The interest in channel models in which the data is sent as an unordered set of binary strings has increased lately, due to emerging applications in DNA storage, among others. In this paper we analyze the minimal redundancy of binary codes for this channel under substitution errors, and provide a code construction for a single substitution that is shown to be asymptotically optimal up to constants. The surprising result in this paper is that while the information vector is sliced into a set of unordered strings, the amount of redundant bits that are required to correct errors is orderwise equivalent to the amount required in the classical error correcting paradigm.