Fundamental Limits of Thermal-noise Lossy Bosonic Multiple Access Channel

Bosonic channels describe quantum-mechanically many practical communication links such as optical, microwave, and radiofrequency. We investigate the maximum rates for the bosonic multiple access channel (MAC) in the presence of thermal noise added by the environment and when the transmitters utilize Gaussian state inputs. We develop an outer bound for the capacity region for the thermal-noise lossy bosonic MAC. We additionally find that the use of coherent states at the transmitters is capacity-achieving in the limits of high and low mean input photon numbers. Furthermore, we verify that coherent states are capacity-achieving for the sum rate of the channel. In the non-asymptotic regime, when a global mean photon-number constraint is imposed on the transmitters, coherent states are the optimal Gaussian state. Surprisingly however, the use of single-mode squeezed states can increase the capacity over that afforded by coherent state encoding when each transmitter is photon number constrained individually.