Stochastic Resonance in the Information Capacity of a Nonlinear Dynamic System

Abstract

We consider a nonlinear bistable dynamic system governed by the quartic potential with two-state quantization at the output — the earliest system to have revealed the phenomenon of periodic stochastic resonance. We devise a scheme in which this system is used to transmit a broadband aperiodic informative signal. With this scheme, we demonstrate that the system can be operated as a memoryless symmetric binary channel, and we develop the characterization of the transmission up to the evaluation of the input–output information capacity of this channel. We show that a regime exists where the information capacity can be increased by means of noise addition, a property we interpret as a form of aperiodic stochastic resonance. In addition, we demonstrate that a positive input–output gain in the efficacy of the signal recovery can be obtained with the stochastic resonator, compared to the recovery that would directly operate on the input signal-plus-noise mixture.