On Random-Coding Union Bounds with and Without Erasures

Upper bounds on the error probability of channel coding are derived for codebooks drawn from random codebook ensembles with various independence and symmetry assumptions. For regular decoding (without an erasure option), the random coding union bound of Polyanskiy et al. is improved by carefully taking ties (equal likelihood scores) into account. It is shown that the improved bound is always better than threshold-decoding based bounds. The framework is extended to the case of decoding with an erasure option, deriving several achievability bounds in the same spirit. In order to exemplify the merits of the approach, the bounds are evaluated for the case of pairwise-independent uniformly-distributed ensembles (e.g., shifted random linear codes).