Towards an Information Theory of Large Networks: An Achievable Rate Region

Overview

This paper studies communication networks of arbitrary size and topology and communicating over a general vector discrete memoryless channel. The paper proposes an information-theoretic constructive scheme for obtaining an achievable rate region in such networks. Many well-known capacity-defining achievable rate regions can be derived as special cases of the proposed scheme. A few such examples are the physically degraded and reversely-degraded relay channels, the Gaussian multiple-access channel, and the Gaussian broadcast channel. The proposed scheme also leads to inner bounds for the multicast and allcast capacities.