The Benefit of Encoder Cooperation in the Presence of State Information

TL;DR

This paper investigates how encoder cooperation facilitated by shared information can significantly improve the sum-capacity in a multiple access channel with state information, especially under various causality constraints.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing the benefits of encoder cooperation with state information, providing conditions for unbounded capacity gains.

Findings

Cooperation can lead to infinite slope capacity gains.

State information at encoders and decoder enhances cooperation benefits.

Conditions for capacity improvement depend on causality constraints.

Abstract

In many communication networks, the availability of channel state information at various nodes provides an opportunity for network nodes to work together, or "cooperate." This work studies the benefit of cooperation in the multiple access channel with a cooperation facilitator, distributed state information at the encoders, and full state information available at the decoder. Under various causality constraints, sufficient conditions are obtained such that encoder cooperation through the facilitator results in a gain in sum-capacity that has infinite slope in the information rate shared with the encoders. This result extends the prior work of the authors on cooperation in networks where none of the nodes have access to state information.