On the Reliability Function of Discrete Memoryless Multiple-Access Channel With Feedback

The reliability function of a channel is the maximum achievable exponential rate of decay of the error probability as a function of the transmission rate. In this work, we derive bounds on the reliability function of discrete memoryless multiple-access channels (MAC) with noiseless feedback. We show that our bounds are tight for a variety of MACs, such as m-ary additive and two independent point-to-point channels. The bounds are expressed in terms of a new information measure called “variable-length directed information”. The outer bound is proved by analyzing stochastic processes defined based on the entropy of the message, given the past channel’s outputs. Our method relies on tools from the theory of martingales, variable-length information measures, and a new technique called time pruning. We further propose a variable-length achievable scheme consisting of three phases: (i) data transmission, (ii) hybrid data-confirmation, and (iii) full confirmation. We show that two-phase-type schemes are strictly suboptimal in achieving the MAC’s reliability function. Moreover, we study the shape of the lower-bound and show that it increases linearly with respect to a specific Euclidean distance measure defined between the transmission rate pair and the capacity boundary. As side results, we derive an outer bound on the capacity of MAC with noiseless feedback and study a new problem involving a hybrid of hypothesis testing and data transmission.