A General Formula for Compound Channel Capacity

TL;DR

This paper derives a comprehensive formula for the capacity of arbitrary compound channels with receiver channel state information, without assuming ergodicity or stationarity, and introduces new concepts like uniform compound channels and the compound inf-information rate.

Contribution

It generalizes existing capacity formulas to arbitrary compound channels, introduces a uniform channel class, and extends results to arbitrary varying channels and $ ext{ε}$-capacity.

Findings

A general capacity formula for arbitrary compound channels is established.

The concept of uniform compound channels is introduced and analyzed.

Conditions for the equality of worst-case and compound capacities are identified.

Abstract

A general formula for the capacity of arbitrary compound channels with the receiver channel state information is obtained using the information density approach. No assumptions of ergodicity, stationarity or information stability are made and the channel state set is arbitrary. A direct (constructive) proof is given. To prove achievability, we generalize Feinstein Lemma to the compound channel setting, and to prove converse, we generalize Verdu-Han Lemma to the same compound setting. A notion of a uniform compound channel is introduced and the general formula is shown to reduce to the familiar $\sup-\inf$ expression for such channels. As a by-product, the arbitrary varying channel capacity is established under maximum error probability and deterministic coding. Conditions are established under which the worst-case and compound channel capacities are equal so that the full channel state information at the transmitter brings in no advantage. The compound inf-information rate plays a prominent role in the general formula. Its properties are studied and a link between information-unstable and information-stable regimes of a compound channel is established. The results are extended to include $\varepsilon$-capacity of compound channels. Sufficient and necessary conditions for the strong converse to hold are given.