On the Discrete Memoryless Partially Cooperative Relay Broadcast Channel and the Broadcast Channel With Cooperating Decoders

We derive two inner bounds on the rate region of the partially cooperative relay broadcast channel. The first inner bound is based on the Cover and El Gamal generalized strategy for the original relay channel, while the second inner bound is based on the strategy proposed recently by Chong, Motani, and Garg, for the relay channel, which combines backward decoding and simultaneous decoding. Both rate regions subsume the inner bound reported by Liang and Kramer which is based just on the decode-and-forward strategy for the common message. A broadcast channel with cooperating decoders is a broadcast channel wherein the receivers, once observing their outputs, may exchange messages via a pair of channels with specified capacities. An achievable rate region for this model is derived based on the first coding strategy for the partially cooperative relay broadcast channel. This region subsumes the Dabora and Servetto rate region. A converse result is proved for this model based on the converse result of Nair and El Gamal for the broadcast channel and Willems's converse proof for the multiple-access channel with cooperating encoders.