On State Dependent Broadcast Channels with Cooperation

In this paper, we investigate problems of communication over physically degraded, state-dependent broadcast channels (BCs) with cooperating decoders. Two different setups are considered and their capacity regions are characterized. First, we study a setting in which one decoder can use a finite capacity link to send the other decoder information regarding the messages or the channel states. In this scenario we analyze two cases: one where noncausal state information is available to the encoder and the strong decoder and the other where state information is available only to the encoder in a causal manner. Second, we examine a setting in which the cooperation between the decoders is limited to taking place before the outputs of the channel are given. In this case, one decoder, which is informed of the state sequence noncausally, can cooperate only to send the other decoder rate-limited information about the state sequence. The proofs of the capacity regions introduce a new method of coding for channels with cooperation between different users, where we exploit the link between the decoders for multiple-binning. Finally, we discuss the optimality of using rate splitting techniques when coding for cooperative BCs. In particular, we show that rate splitting is not necessarily optimal when coding for cooperative BCs by solving an example in which our method of coding outperforms rate splitting. Index Terms Binning, broadcast channels, causal coding, channel capacity, cooperative broadcast, degraded broadcast channel, noncausal coding, partial side information, side information, state-dependent channels.