On the capacity of a cascade of identical discrete memoryless nonsingular channels (Corresp.)

A simplified procedure for calculating the channel capacity of a cascade of identical discrete memoryless nonsingular channels is presented. The result depends only upon the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of any one of the subchannel transition matrices. Thus, for small and large (the usual case of interest) the result represents a considerable saving in computation relative to the standard technique of finding the overall channel transition matrix. The procedure is illustrated for an cascade of binary symmetric channels.