On the role of interference decoding in compound broadcast channels

This work investigates the general three-message compound broadcast channel (BC) where an encoder wishes to communicate a common and two private messages to two groups of users. We focus on the study of the largest achievable region when the encoder is constrained to use a single description per message that we refer to as “simplified random codes”. In this setting, we investigate the different roles that decoders can play at the destinations. Surprisingly enough, we show that simultaneous decoding of both the intended as well as the interference message at the destinations can strictly enlarge-in opposition with the standard BC- the rate region with respect to the worst-case (over all channels) of Marton's inner bound.