Rewritable storage channels

Abstract

We introduce a general model of the rewritable storage channel in which rewriting can be used to improve storage capacity at the cost of encoding time. We then focus on a particular rewritable storage channel and show that if the average number of writes increases by a factor of c, storage capacity increases by an additional log c bits; we conjecture that capacity gains due to iterations for other scenarios will follow a similar trend. We will also discuss a number of open problems with practical significance in the context of rewritable storage channels.