Cooperative Binning for Semideterministic Channels

The capacity regions of semideterministic multiuser channels, such as the semideterministic relay channel and the multiple access channel with partially cribbing encoders, have been characterized using the idea of partial-decode-forward. However, the requirement to explicitly decode part of the message at intermediate nodes can be restrictive in some settings; for example, when nodes have different side information regarding the state of the channel. In this paper, we generalize this scheme to cooperative-bin-forward by building on the observation that explicit recovering of part of the message is not needed to induce cooperation. Instead, encoders can bin their received signals and cooperatively forward the bin index to the decoder. The main advantage of this new scheme is illustrated by considering state-dependent extensions of the aforementioned semideterministic setups. While partial-decode-forward is suboptimal in these new setups, cooperative-bin-forward continues to achieve capacity.