We investigate the use of Gallager's low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in
a broadcast channel, one of the fundamental models in network information
theory. Combining linear codes is a standard technique in practical network
communication schemes and is known to provide better performance than simple
timesharing methods when algebraic codes are used. The statistical physics
based analysis shows that the practical performance of the suggested method,
achieved by employing the belief propagation algorithm, is superior to that of
LDPC based timesharing codes while the best performance, when received
transmissions are optimally decoded, is bounded by the timesharing limit.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure