CAPACITY REGION OF GENERAL MULTIPLE-ACCESS CHANNEL WITH CERTAIN CORRELATED SOURCES

A study of a class of multiple-user channels including general multiple-access channels with many correlated sources and many simultaneous receivers is presented. The main result is summarized as Theorems 4.1 and 5.1 which establish a simple characterization of the capacity region on the basis of the polymatroidal structure of a set of (conditional) mutual informations. The results include, as special cases, the Slepian and Wolf's result (1973) as well as Ulrey's (1975). These may be regarded as further developments along the line shown by Ahlswede (1971) and Liao (1972). Furthermore, a finite upper bound for the cardinalities of the ranges of auxiliary variables is given in Theorems 4.2 and 5.2. Finally, the relation between Slepian-Wolf's formalism and ours is clarified. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.