This work studies the deviations of the error exponent of the constant composition code ensemble around its expectation, known as the error exponent of the typical random code (TRC). In particular, it is shown that the probability of randomly drawing a codebook whose error exponent is smaller than the TRC exponent is exponentially small; upper and lower bounds for this exponent are given, which coincide in some cases. In addition, the probability of randomly drawing a codebook whose error exponent is larger than the TRC exponent is shown to be double-exponentially small; upper and lower bounds to the double-exponential exponent are given. The results suggest that codebooks whose error exponent is larger than the error exponent of the TRC are extremely rare. The key ingredient in the proofs is a new large deviations result of type class enumerators with dependent variables.

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We provide two results concerning the optimality of the maximum mutual information (MMI) decoder. First, we prove that the error exponents of the typical random codes under the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) decoder and the MMI decoder are equal. As a corollary to this result, we also show that the error exponents of the expurgated codes under the ML and the MMI decoders are equal. These results strengthen the well known result due to Csiszár and Körner, according to which, these decoders achieve equal random coding error exponents, since the error exponents of the typical random code and the expurgated code are strictly higher than the random coding error exponents, at least at low coding rates. While the universal optimality of the MMI decoder, in the random-coding error exponent sense, is easily proven by commuting the expectation over the channel noise and the expectation over the ensemble, when it comes to typical and expurgated exponents, this commutation can no longer be carried out. Therefore, the proof of the universal optimality of the MMI decoder must be completely different and it turns out to be highly non-trivial.

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