A Lego-Brick Approach to Coding for Network Communication
Nadim Ghaddar
Abstract:
In this work, we construct coding schemes for several problems in network information theory starting from point-to-point channel codes that are designed for symmetric channels. The block error rate performance of the coding schemes is derived in terms of properties of the constituent codes, pertaining to the rate, the error probability, and the distribution of decoded sequences. Given these properties, the performance guarantees hold irrespective of other properties of the codes. This would allow one to leverage commercial off-the-shelf codes for point-to-point symmetric channels in the practical implementation of codes over networks. In particular, we consider the problems of Gelfand-Pinsker coding (to which coding for an asymmetric channel is a special case), Wyner-Ziv coding (to which lossy source coding is a special case), Marton coding for broadcast channels, and coding for cloud radio access networks (C-RAN’s). We show that the coding schemes achieve the best known inner bounds for these problems, provided that the constituent point-to-point codes are rate-optimal. Simulation results demonstrate the gain of the proposed coding schemes compared to existing solutions.