Homologous Codes for Multiple Access Channels

Building on recent development by Padakandla and Pradhan, and by Lim, Feng, Pastore, Nazer, and Gastpar, this paper studies the potential of structured coset coding as a complete replacement for random coding in network information theory. The roles of two techniques used in coset coding to generate nonuniform codewords, namely, shaping and channel transformation, are clarified and illustrated via the simple example of the two-sender multiple access channel. While individually deficient, the optimal combination of shaping via nested coset codes of the same generator matrix (which we refer to as homologous codes) and channel transformation is shown to achieve the same performance as traditional random codes for the general two-sender multiple access channel. The achievability proof of the capacity region is extended to multiple access channels with more than two senders, and with one or more receivers. A quantization argument adapted to the proposed combination of two techniques is presented to establish the achievability proof for their Gaussian counterparts. It is illustrated by an example that combining shaping and channel transformation is useful even when the goal of transmission for a subset of the receivers is to recover a linear combination of messages. These results open up new possibilities of utilizing homologous codes for a broader class of applications.