A New Upper Bound on the Capacity of a Class of Primitive Relay Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new upper bound on the capacity of a specific class of relay channels, improving upon existing bounds and characterizing capacity for channels where the relay observes an independent sequence.

Contribution

The paper derives a novel upper bound on relay channel capacity, recovering known results and establishing capacity for new channel classes where the cut-set bound is not tight.

Findings

The new bound recovers capacity results from previous studies.

For certain channels, the bound is strictly tighter than the cut-set bound.

The bound shows the optimality of the compress-and-forward scheme in some cases.

Abstract

We obtain a new upper bound on the capacity of a class of discrete memoryless relay channels. For this class of relay channels, the relay observes an i.i.d. sequence $T$, which is independent of the channel input $X$. The channel is described by a set of probability transition functions $p(y|x,t)$ for all $(x,t,y)\in \mathcal{X}\times \mathcal{T}\times \mathcal{Y}$. Furthermore, a noiseless link of finite capacity $R_{0}$ exists from the relay to the receiver. Although the capacity for these channels is not known in general, the capacity of a subclass of these channels, namely when $T=g(X,Y)$, for some deterministic function $g$, was obtained in [1] and it was shown to be equal to the cut-set bound. Another instance where the capacity was obtained was in [2], where the channel output $Y$ can be written as $Y=X\oplus Z$, where $\oplus$ denotes modulo-$m$ addition, $Z$ is independent of $X$, $|\mathcal{X}|=|\mathcal{Y}|=m$, and $T$ is some stochastic function of $Z$. The compress-and-forward (CAF) achievability scheme [3] was shown to be capacity achieving in both cases. Using our upper bound we recover the capacity results of [1] and [2]. We also obtain the capacity of a class of channels which does not fall into either of the classes studied in [1] and [2]. For this class of channels, CAF scheme is shown to be optimal but capacity is strictly less than the cut-set bound for certain values of $R_{0}$. We also evaluate our outer bound for a particular relay channel with binary multiplicative states and binary additive noise for which the channel is given as $Y=TX+N$. We show that our upper bound is strictly better than the cut-set upper bound for certain values of $R_{0}$ but it lies strictly above the rates yielded by the CAF achievability scheme.