CODE CONSTRUCTION FOR THE NOISELESS BINARY SWITCHING MULTIPLE-ACCESS CHANNEL

The noiseless coding problem is considered for a recently introduced discrete memoryless multiple-access channel that is a counterpart to the well-known binary adder channel. Upper and lower bounds on the number of code words in a uniquely decodable code pair are given, from which the zero-error capacity region of the channel is derived. This region coincides with the classical capacity region of this channel. The proof uses the notion of second-order distance of a code. For several values of n and k, good code pairs of block length n are constructed, with the first code being [n,k]-linear. Some of these are found to be optimal. Some convolutional codes are investigated that yield additional good rate pairs.