Can Negligible Rate Increase Network Reliability?

Abstract

In network cooperation strategies, nodes work together with the aim of increasing transmission rates or reliability. This paper demonstrates that enabling cooperation between the transmitters of a two-user multiple access channel via a cooperation facilitator that has access to both messages results in a network whose maximal- and average-error capacity regions are the same; this benefit ensues even when the information received by each transmitter is negligible. From this result, it follows that if a multiple access channel with no transmitter cooperation has different maximal- and average-error sumcapacities, then the maximal-error sum-capacity of the network consisting of this channel and a cooperation facilitator is not continuous with respect to the output edge capacities of the facilitator. Thus there exist networks where adding negligible rate yields a non-negligible benefit.

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