Structural Properties of Index Coding Capacity Using Fractional Graph Theory

The capacity region of the index coding problem is characterized through the notion of confusion graph and its fractional chromatic number. Based on this multiletter characterization, several structural properties of the capacity region are established, some of which are already noted by Tahmasbi, Shahrasbi, and Gohari, but proved here with simple and more direct graph-theoretic arguments. In particular, the capacity region of a given index coding problem is shown to be simple functionals of the capacity regions of smaller subproblems when the interaction between the subproblems is none, one-way, or complete.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT

On Critical Index Coding Problems

The question of under what condition some side information for index coding can be removed without affecting the capacity region is studied, which was originally posed by Tahmasbi, Shahrasbi, and Gohari. To answer this question, the notion of unicycle for the side information graph is introduced and it is shown that any edge that belongs to a unicycle is critical, namely, it cannot be removed without reducing the capacity region. Although this sufficient condition for criticality is not necessary in general, a partial converse is established, which elucidates the connection between the notion of unicycle and the maximal acylic induced subgraph outer bound on the capacity region by Bar-Yossef, Birk, Jayram, and Kol.Comment: 5 pages, accepted to 2015 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Jeju Island, Kore

TDMA is Optimal for All-unicast DoF Region of TIM if and only if Topology is Chordal Bipartite

The main result of this work is that an orthogonal access scheme such as TDMA achieves the all-unicast degrees of freedom (DoF) region of the topological interference management (TIM) problem if and only if the network topology graph is chordal bipartite, i.e., every cycle that can contain a chord, does contain a chord. The all-unicast DoF region includes the DoF region for any arbitrary choice of a unicast message set, so e.g., the results of Maleki and Jafar on the optimality of orthogonal access for the sum-DoF of one-dimensional convex networks are recovered as a special case. The result is also established for the corresponding topological representation of the index coding problem

Mathematical Programming Decoding of Binary Linear Codes: Theory and Algorithms

Mathematical programming is a branch of applied mathematics and has recently been used to derive new decoding approaches, challenging established but often heuristic algorithms based on iterative message passing. Concepts from mathematical programming used in the context of decoding include linear, integer, and nonlinear programming, network flows, notions of duality as well as matroid and polyhedral theory. This survey article reviews and categorizes decoding methods based on mathematical programming approaches for binary linear codes over binary-input memoryless symmetric channels.Comment: 17 pages, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Published July 201

Index Coding: Rank-Invariant Extensions

An index coding (IC) problem consisting of a server and multiple receivers with different side-information and demand sets can be equivalently represented using a fitting matrix. A scalar linear index code to a given IC problem is a matrix representing the transmitted linear combinations of the message symbols. The length of an index code is then the number of transmissions (or equivalently, the number of rows in the index code). An IC problem ${\cal I}_{ext}$ is called an extension of another IC problem ${\cal I}$ if the fitting matrix of ${\cal I}$ is a submatrix of the fitting matrix of ${\cal I}_{ext}$. We first present a straightforward $m$\textit{-order} extension ${\cal I}_{ext}$ of an IC problem ${\cal I}$ for which an index code is obtained by concatenating $m$ copies of an index code of ${\cal I}$. The length of the codes is the same for both ${\cal I}$ and ${\cal I}_{ext}$, and if the index code for ${\cal I}$ has optimal length then so does the extended code for ${\cal I}_{ext}$. More generally, an extended IC problem of ${\cal I}$ having the same optimal length as ${\cal I}$ is said to be a \textit{rank-invariant} extension of ${\cal I}$. We then focus on $2$-order rank-invariant extensions of ${\cal I}$, and present constructions of such extensions based on involutory permutation matrices