A Unifying Order-Theoretic Framework for Superposition Coding: Polymatroidal Structure and Optimality in the Multiple-Access Channel With General Message Sets

Two different random coding techniques, both referred to as superposition coding in the literature, have been widely used to obtain inner bounds for the capacity regions of various communication networks. In one, auxiliary codewords are generated independently, and in the other, they are generated in a dependent manner. Using the multiple-access channel with general message sets as a case study, we place the two techniques under a common, order-theoretic framework. The key attribute of this framework is that it explicitly accounts for the acyclic direction and transitivity of the possible auxiliary codeword dependencies, leading to three significant discoveries. First, with respect to a fixed coding distribution, the set of rates achievable by superposition coding with dependent auxiliary codeword generation forms a polymatroid, thereby generalizing the same previously known result for superposition coding with independent auxiliary codewords. Second, we obtain a large class of superposition coding schemes by intermingling dependent and independent auxiliary codeword generation, and demonstrate that the constituent polyhedral achievable rate regions are also polymatroids in each case. The third discovery is that, in the multiple-access channel with general message sets, each associated superposition coding inner bound attains the capacity region. These results demonstrate a tradeoff between the complexity of dependencies in auxiliary codeword generation and that of the function that maps them into transmitted codewords.