Strong Coordination over Noisy Channels: Is Separation Sufficient?

Abstract

We study the problem of strong coordination of actions of two agents $X$ and $Y$ that communicate over a noisy communication channel such that the actions follow a given joint probability distribution. We propose two novel schemes for this noisy strong coordination problem, and derive inner bounds for the underlying strong coordination capacity region. The first scheme is a joint coordination-channel coding scheme that utilizes the randomness provided by the communication channel to reduce the local randomness required in generating the action sequence at agent $Y$. The second scheme exploits separate coordination and channel coding where local randomness is extracted from the channel after decoding. Finally, we present an example in which the joint scheme is able to outperform the separate scheme in terms of coordination rate.