Cooperative Binning for Semideterministic Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces cooperative-bin-forward, a novel scheme that enables cooperation in semideterministic channels without explicit decoding, extending capacity-achieving strategies to state-dependent scenarios where previous methods fail.

Contribution

The paper generalizes the partial-decode-forward scheme to cooperative-bin-forward, allowing cooperation without explicit message decoding, applicable to state-dependent semideterministic channels.

Findings

Cooperative-bin-forward achieves capacity in new state-dependent setups.

It extends the applicability of cooperative strategies beyond partial-decode-forward.

The scheme simplifies cooperation by binning received signals instead of decoding messages.

Abstract

The capacity regions of semideterministic multiuser channels, such as the semideterministic relay channel and the multiple access channel with partially cribbing encoders, have been characterized using the idea of partial-decode-forward. However, the requirement to explicitly decode part of the message at intermediate nodes can be restrictive in some settings; for example, when nodes have different side information regarding the state of the channel. In this paper, we generalize this scheme to $\textit{cooperative-bin-forward}$ by building on the observation that explicit recovering of part of the message is not needed to induce cooperation. Instead, encoders can bin their received signals and cooperatively forward the bin index to the decoder. The main advantage of this new scheme is illustrated by considering state-dependent extensions of the aforementioned semideterministic setups. While partial-decode-forward is not applicable in these new setups, cooperative-bin-forward continues to achieve capacity.