On the Two-User Erasure Broadcast Channel with One-Sided Feedback

In this paper, we investigate the two-user erasure broadcast channel in which only one of the receivers feeds the output back to the transmitter. We propose a transmission scheme based on joint source-channel coding and show that the achievable rate region can be strictly larger than the ones previously known for this channel. In particular, the proposed scheme is partially optimal in the sense that the boundary of the achievable region overlaps in part with the boundary of the capacity region of the same channel with two-sided feedback. Thus, we identify a condition under which one-sided feedback is as good as two-sided feedback. Our result also demonstrates the limitation of bit-wise linear transmission schemes previously used for such channels.