  We derive an upper bound on the capacity of non-binary deletion channels.
Although binary deletion channels have received significant attention over the
years, and many upper and lower bounds on their capacity have been derived,
such studies for the non-binary case are largely missing. The state of the art
is the following: as a trivial upper bound, capacity of an erasure channel with
the same input alphabet as the deletion channel can be used, and as a lower
bound the results by Diggavi and Grossglauser are available. In this paper, we
derive the first non-trivial non-binary deletion channel capacity upper bound
and reduce the gap with the existing achievable rates. To derive the results we
first prove an inequality between the capacity of a 2K-ary deletion channel
with deletion probability $d$, denoted by $C_{2K}(d)$, and the capacity of the
binary deletion channel with the same deletion probability, $C_2(d)$, that is,
$C_{2K}(d)\leq C_2(d)+(1-d)\log(K)$. Then by employing some existing upper
bounds on the capacity of the binary deletion channel, we obtain upper bounds
on the capacity of the 2K-ary deletion channel. We illustrate via examples the
use of the new bounds and discuss their asymptotic behavior as $d \rightarrow
0$.
