A Note on Broadcast Channels with Stale State Information at the Transmitter

Abstract

This paper shows that the Maddah-Ali--Tse (MAT) scheme which establishes the symmetric capacity of two example broadcast channels with strictly causal state information at the transmitter is a simple special case of the Shayevitz--Wigger scheme for the broadcast channel with generalized feedback, which involves block Markov coding, compression, superposition coding, Marton coding, and coded time sharing. Focusing on the class of symmetric broadcast channels with state, we derive an expression for the maximum achievable symmetric rate using the Shayevitz--Wigger scheme. We show that the MAT results can be recovered by evaluating this expression for the special case in which superposition coding and Marton coding are not used. We then introduce a new broadcast channel example that shares many features of the MAT examples. We show that another special case of our maximum symmetric rate expression in which superposition coding is also used attains a higher symmetric rate than the MAT scheme. The symmetric capacity of this example is not known, however.