IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, cilt.65, sa.2, ss.816-840, 2019 (SCI-Expanded)
A sphere packing bound (SPB) with a prefactor that is polynomial in the block length n is established for codes on a length n product channel W-[1,W- n], assuming that the maximum order 1/2 Renyi capacity among the component channels, i.e. max(t is an element of[1, n]) C-1/2, W-t, is O(ln n). The reliability function of the discrete stationary product channels with feedback is bounded from above by the sphere packing exponent. Both results are proved by first establishing a non-asymptotic SPB. The latter result continues to hold under a milder stationarity hypothesis.