Interactive Function Computation via Polar Coding

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that polar coding can effectively achieve optimal communication rates for interactive function computation between two terminals and within collocated networks, advancing distributed computing efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces polar coding as a method to attain the rate regions for interactive function computation in distributed settings.

Findings

Polar coding achieves the rate regions for interactive computation.

Multiple rounds of polar-coded transmissions enable optimal communication.

The approach applies to both two-terminal and collocated network scenarios.

Abstract

In a series of papers N. Ma and P. Ishwar (2011-13) considered a range of distributed source coding problems that arise in the context of iterative computation of functions, characterizing the region of achievable communication rates. We consider the problems of interactive computation of functions by two terminals and interactive computation in a collocated network, showing that the rate regions for both these problems can be achieved using several rounds of polar-coded transmissions.