Optimal Transmission Strategy and Capacity Region for Broadcast Z Channels

Abstract — This paper presents an optimal transmission strategy, with simple encoding and decoding, for the two-user broadcast Z channel. This paper provides an explicit-form expression for the capacity region and proves that the optimal surface can be achieved by independent encoding. Specifically, the information messages corresponding to each user are encoded independently and the OR of these two streams is transmitted. Nonlinear turbo codes that pro-vide a controlled distribution of ones and zeros are used to demonstrate a low-complexity scheme that works close to the optimal surface. Index Terms—broadcast channel, broadcast Z channel, ca-pacity region, turbo codes. I

A Mutual Information Invariance Approach to Symmetry in Discrete Memoryless Channels

Abstract — There are numerous notions of symmetry for discrete memoryless channels. A common goal of these various definitions is that the capacity may be easily computed once the channel is declared to be symmetric. In this paper we focus on a class of definitions of symmetry characterized by the invariance of the channel mutual information over a group of permutations of the input distribution. For definitions of symmetry within this class, we give a simple proof of the optimality of the uniform distribution. The fundamental channels are all symmetric with a general enough definition of symmetry. This paper provides a definition of symmetry that covers these fundamental channels along with a proof that is simple enough to find itself on the chalkboard of even the most introductory class in information theory. I