Negligible Cooperation: Contrasting the Maximal- and Average-Error Cases

In communication networks, cooperative strategies are coding schemes where network nodes work together to improve performance metrics such as the total rate delivered across the network. This work studies encoder cooperation in the setting of a discrete multiple access channel (MAC) with two encoder...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on information theory 2021-09, Vol.67 (9), p.5885-5902
Main Authors: Noorzad, Parham, Langberg, Michael, Effros, Michelle
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Capacity planning
Capacity region continuity
Coders
Communication networks
Cooperation
cooperation facilitator
Decoding
edge removal problem
Errors
Interference
maximal-error capacity region
multiple access channel
Network coding
Performance measurement
Source coding
Upper bound
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In communication networks, cooperative strategies are coding schemes where network nodes work together to improve performance metrics such as the total rate delivered across the network. This work studies encoder cooperation in the setting of a discrete multiple access channel (MAC) with two encoders and a single decoder. A network node, here called the cooperation facilitator (CF), that is connected to both encoders via rate-limited links, enables the cooperation strategy. Previous work by the authors presents two classes of MACs: (i) one class where the average-error sum-capacity has an infinite derivative in the limit where CF output link capacities approach zero, and (ii) a second class of MACs where the maximal-error sum-capacity is not continuous at the point where the output link capacities of the CF equal zero. This work contrasts the power of the CF in the maximal- and average-error cases, showing that a constant number of bits communicated over the CF output link can yield a positive gain in the maximal-error sum-capacity, while a far greater number of bits, even a number that grows sublinearly in the blocklength, can never yield a non-negligible gain in the average-error sum-capacity.
ISSN:0018-9448
1557-9654
DOI:10.1109/TIT.2021.3093891