Broadcast Channels with Cooperating Decoders

TL;DR

This paper studies the capacity limits of discrete memoryless broadcast channels with cooperating receivers exchanging noiseless messages, providing capacity results for degraded channels and achievable schemes for general channels.

Contribution

It formulates the broadcast with cooperation problem and derives the capacity region for degraded channels, along with achievable results for general channels.

Findings

Capacity region for physically degraded broadcast channels with cooperation

Achievability schemes for general broadcast channels with cooperation

Extension of broadcast channel theory to include receiver cooperation

Abstract

We consider the problem of communicating over the general discrete memoryless broadcast channel (BC) with partially cooperating receivers. In our setup, receivers are able to exchange messages over noiseless conference links of finite capacities, prior to decoding the messages sent from the transmitter. In this paper we formulate the general problem of broadcast with cooperation. We first find the capacity region for the case where the BC is physically degraded. Then, we give achievability results for the general broadcast channel, for both the two independent messages case and the single common message case.