There are two variants of superposition coding schemes. Cover's original
superposition coding scheme has code clouds of the identical shape, while
Bergmans's superposition coding scheme has code clouds of independently
generated shapes. These two schemes yield identical achievable rate regions in
several scenarios, such as the capacity region for degraded broadcast channels.
This paper shows that under the optimal maximum likelihood decoding, these two
superposition coding schemes can result in different rate regions. In
particular, it is shown that for the two-receiver broadcast channel, Cover's
superposition coding scheme can achieve rates strictly larger than Bergmans's
scheme.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, submitted to IEEE International
Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2013