Communication-II (EC 31204)

Problem Set-1
Course Instructor: Amitalok J. Budkuley
Department of Electrical & Electronics Communication Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Note: Some of these problems are sourced from Chapters 1 and 2 of the book by BT, see references below.
1. Out of the students in a class, 60% are geniuses, 70% love chocolate, and 40% fall into both categories.
Determine the probability that a randomly selected student is neither a genius nor a chocolate lover.
2. A six-sided die is loaded in a way that each even face is twice as likely as each odd face. All even faces are
equally likely, as are all odd faces. Construct a probabilistic model for a single roll of this die, and find the
probability that the outcome is less than 4.
3. A four-sided die is rolled repeatedly, until the first time (if ever) that an even number is obtained. What is the
sample space for this experiment?
4. You enter a special kind of chess tournament, in which you play one game with each of three opponents, but
you get to choose the order in which you play your opponents, knowing the probability of a win against each.
You win the tournament if you win two games in a row, and you want to maximize the probability of winning.
Show that it is optimal to play the weakest opponent second, and that the order of playing the other two
opponents does not matter.
5. A coin is tossed twice. Alice claims that the event of two heads is at least as likely if we know that the first
toss is a head than if we know that at least one of the tosses is a head. Is she right? Does it make a difference
if the coin is fair or unfair? How can we generalize Alice’s reasoning?
6. A batch of one hundred items is inspected by testing four randomly selected items. If one of the four is defective,
the batch is rejected. What is the probability that the batch is accepted if it contains five defectives?
7. Alice and Bob have 2n + 1 coins, each coin with probability of heads equal to 1/2. Bob tosses n + 1 coins, while
Alice tosses the remaining n coins. Assuming independent coin tosses, show that the probability that after all
coins have been tossed, Bob will have got more heads than Alice is 1/2.
8. A hunter has two hunting dogs. One day, on the trail of some animal, the hunter comes to a place where the
road diverges into two paths. He knows that each dog, independent of the other, will choose the correct path
with probability p. The hunter decides to let each dog chose a path, and if they agree, take that one, and if
they disagree, to randomly pick a path. Is his strategy better than just letting one of the two dogs decide on
a path?
9. A source transmits a message (a string of symbols) through a noisy communication channel. Each symbol is 0
or 1 with probability p and 1 − p, respectively, and received incorrectly with probability ϵ0 and ϵ1 , respectively.
Error in different symbol transmissions are, independent.

Figure 1: Error Probabilities in binary communication channel

(a) What is the probability that k th -symbol is received correctly?

(b) What is the probability that the string of symbols 1011 is received correctly?
(c) In an effort to improve the reliability, each symbol is transmitted three times and the received string is
decoded by majority rule. In other words, a 0(or a 1) is transmitted as 000 (or 111, respectively), and it
is decoded at the receiver as a 0(or 1) if and only if the received three-symbol string contains at least two
0’s (or 1’s respectively). What is the probability that a 0 is correctly decoded?
(d) For what values of ϵ0 is there improvement in the probability of correct decoding of a 0 when the scheme
of part(c) is used?

1
 (e) Suppose that the scheme of part (c) is used. What is the probability that a symbol was 0 given that the
received string is 101?
10. A cellular phone system services a population of n1 “voice users” (those who occasionally need a voice connec-
tion) and n2 ”data users” (those who occasionally need a data connection). We estimate that at a given time,
each user will need to be connected to the system with probability p1 (for voice users) or p2 (for data users),
independent of other users. The data rate for a voice user is r1 bits/sec and for a data user is r2 bits/sec. The
cellular system has a total capacity of C bits/sec. What is the probability that more users want to use the
system than the system can accommodate, i.e., the system is operating beyond capacity or overwhelmed ?
11. Consider a sequence of independent and identically distributed trials, say X1 , X2 , · · · , Xn ... of a Bernoulli
random variable X ∼ Bern(p), where p ∈ [0, 1]. Describe in words the event which characterizes the following
random variables (look up their definitions):
(a) Binomial random variable
(b) Geometric random variable
(c) Negative binomial random variable
(d) Hypergeometric random variable
(e) Pascal random variable
(f) What is the probability for the following events arising out of {Xi }:
• the first success does not occur till the m-th trial (m is a constant)
• the third success occurs between the m-th and m + k-th trial (m and k are constants)
(g) Let m1 , m2 · · · , mk be fixed and given numbers. Let Y denote the number of trials for the k + 1-th success
after the 1-st success occurs at m1 , the second success occurs at m2 , and so on till the k-th success occurs
at mk . Find the range of values taken by Y and the distribution of Y.
(h) Let Z denote the number of trials needed for the first occurrence of 3 successive ones (1s), i.e., to get the
first run-of-1s of size 3. What is the distribution of Z?
(i) Create an interesting problem of your own with Bernoulli trials?

References
1. Dimitri Bertsekas, and John N. Tsitsiklis, Introduction to probability., Vol. 1. Athena Scientific, 2008.
2. Sheldon Ross, Introduction to Probability Models, 9th Edition, Elsevier Inc., 2007