A Lego-Brick Approach to Coding for Asymmetric Channels and Channels with State

Coding schemes for asymmetric channels and channels with state are developed starting from a pair of linear codes designed for symmetric channels. Guarantees on the block error rate performance of the coding schemes are derived in terms of the parameters of the constituent codes. Assuming the constituent codes satisfy some properties on the rate, the error probability, and the distribution of the Hamming distance to decoded sequences, the performance guarantees hold irrespective of other properties of the codes. This would allow one to leverage commercial off-the-shelf codes for point-to-point symmetric channels to design codes for asymmetric channels and channels with state known noncausally at the encoder.