The capacity of the semi-deterministic relay channel (SD-RC) with non-causal channel state information (CSI) only at the encoder and decoder is characterized. The capacity is achieved by a scheme based on cooperative-binforward. This scheme allows cooperation between the transmitter and the relay without the need to decode a part of the message by the relay. The transmission is divided into blocks and each deterministic output of the channel (observed by the relay) is mapped to a bin. The bin index is used by the encoder and the relay to choose the cooperation codeword in the next transmission block. In causal settings the cooperation is independent of the state.In non-causal settings dependency between the relay's transmission and the state can increase the transmission rates.The encoder implicitly conveys partial state information to the relay. In particular, it uses the states of the next block and selects a cooperation codeword accordingly and the relay transmission depends on the cooperation codeword and therefore also on the states. We also consider the multiple access channel with partial cribbing as a semi-deterministic channel. The capacity region of this channel with non-causal CSI is achieved by the new scheme. Examining the result in several cases, we introduce a new problem of a point-to-point (PTP) channel where the state is provided to the transmitter by a state encoder. Interestingly, even though the CSI is also available at the receiver, we provide an example which shows that the capacity with non-causal CSI at the state encoder is strictly larger than the capacity with causal CSI.
Index TermsCooperative-bin-forward, cooperation, cribbing, multiple-access channel, non-causal state information, random binning, relay channel, semi-deterministic channel, state encoder, wireless networks. Fig. 1: SD-RC with causal/non-causal CSI at encoder and decoder.The capacity of the relay channel was first studied by van der Muelen [1]. In the relay channel, an encoder receives a message, denoted by M , and sends it to a decoder over a channel with two outputs. A relay observes one of the channel outputs, denoted by Z, and uses past observations in order to help the encoder deliver the message.The decoder observes the other output, denoted by Y , and uses it to decode the message that was sent by the encoder. Cover and El-Gamal [2] established achievable rates for the general relay channel, using a partial-decodeforward scheme. If the channel is semi-deterministic (i.e. the output to the relay is a function of the channel inputs),El-Gamal and Aref [3] showed that this scheme achieves the capacity. Partial-decode-forward operates as follows:first, the transmission is divided into B blocks, each of length n; in each block b we send a message M (b) , at rate R, that is independent of the messages in the other blocks. The message is split; after each transmission block, the relay decodes a part of the message and forwards it to the decoder in the next block using its transmission sequence.Since the encoder also k...